... Standards official gives publication thumbs up

IN HIS review of Jamaican food scientist Dr André Gordon’s Food Safety and Quality Systems in Developing Countries, James Rawle, chairman of the Standards Council of the Bureau of Standards Jamaica (BSJ), said that it was of tremendous value to students and scholars of food science and technology, as well as food industry professionals regionally and worldwide.

The book, Rawle noted, covers the fundamentals of food science, including the physical, chemical and ingredient interactions, and the microbiological and sensory aspects of food.

“The work draws on years of real-life interventions in a range of industries and essentially looks at food safety quality systems through the prisms of traditional foods and meal ingredients from developing countries that are gaining, or have gained, widescale acceptance in developed markets, and the inevitable food safety, regulatory and quality issues arising, which translates into ‘the dreaded marketaccess issues’,” he pointed out.

DECODING PROCESSES

Rawle noted that some traditional products and the processes applied to them are “decoded”, in that the science involved in their manufacture, stability, and important, safety and quality, is precisely elucidated and challenged through carefully designed studies. In support of this, he added, processes and conditions are precisely defined, flows streamlined and documented to ensure guaranteed standards, outcomes, repeatability, consistency and safety every time.

The main point affirmed by this development, Mr Rawle said, was that many traditional Jamaican foods (including jerk sauces and seasonings, browning, coconut water, canned ackees, and callaloo) are fast becoming mainstream products in developed markets, no longer confined to ethnic shops, but are prominently present in the large multiple-branch food chains in those markets, in line with their expanding consumer appeal.

The book is published by world-leading scientific and technical publishers Elsevier, through its Academic Press imprint and is available on Amazon.com as well as from the publisher. Locally, books are available at Technological Solutions Limited at the Trade Centre on Red Hills Road.