Revolutionising ready meals

Food industry supplier OAL Group has announced a research project that the company hopes will revolutionise ready meals.

The project, part-funded by Innovate UK, will last two years and aims to develop an innovative cooking and cryogenic cooling system for ready meals in order to improve product quality and healthiness. The project seeks to help tackle the current levels of food waste and increase the speed of production.

The project, to be undertaken at the University of Lincoln’s National Centre for Food Manufacturing, will see OAL partner with BOC, the University of Lincoln and Iceland Manufacturing. It will combine OAL’s rapid-cooking Steam Infusion Vaction technology with a cryogenic cooler from BOC.

The team plans to gain a full scientific understanding of the effects of rapid cooling using liquid nitrogen on sauces and soups and the vegetables, fruits and meats they contain in order to maximise nutritional values. Product shelf life could also be increased and waste minimised, as the group hopes to develop a fully flexible process that will reduce production, cleaning and changeover times for increasingly variable supply requirements.