Table 5 Suggested classification parameters for major (1–6) and specific (7,8) consumer-relevant food product properties

From: Defining the role of processing in food classification systems—the IUFoST formulation & processing approach

No.

Product property (PP)

Formulation (F) - CPs

Processing (P) - ∆CPs

F&P coupling

1

Nutrition Value

E.g. NRF*x.y.z

ΔNRF*x.y.z

FPFIN

2

Sustainability

E.g. Global warming potential (GWP)

ΔGWP (global warming potential) difference

FPFISU

3

Palatability

E.g. Sensory Score (SS)

Energy consumption to reach satiation (EC-Sat)

Volume consumption to reach satiation (VC-Sat)

ΔSS

ΔEC-Sat

ΔVC-Sat

FPFISS

FPFIEC-Sat

FPFIVC-Sat

4

Safety

E.g. Colony forming unit (CFU) count

ΔCFU

FPFICFU

5

Convenience

E.g. Convenience score (CS)

ΔCS

FPFICS

6

Affordability

E.g. Energy consumption/$ or NRFx.y/$; NRF*x.y.z/$

ΔEC$

ΔNRF/$; ΔNRF*/$

FPFIEC$

FPFINRF$

FPFINRF*$

7

Digestibility:

e.g. for proteins

E.g. PDCAAS

DIAAS

ΔPDCAAS

ΔDIAAS

FPFIPDCAAS

FPFIDIAAS

8

INFOGEST (IG) parameters P1…PN

E.g. IG-Pi

ΔIG-Pi

FPFIIGPi

  1. PDCAAS = protein digestibility corrected amino acid score, DIAAS = ratio of digestible amino acid content in the food (mg/g of protein) to the same amino acid in a reference pattern taken from age-specific amino acid requirements; INFOGEST = in vitro simulation of gastrointestinal food digestion.
  2. No. 1 in Table 5 represents the case treated in detail within this report. In some of the product properties like 1 (Nutrition Value), 3 (Palatability), 4 (Safety), 5 (Convenience), and 7 (Digestibility), the processing is known to allow for improvements. However, improvement in one of these may cause trade-offs for another one.
  3. For No. 2 (Sustainability) processing will, in general, add an additional negative load. However different ways of processing can be differentiated, and the least burdensome process can be identified and selected.
  4. For No. 6 (affordability) processing costs are added; however, the resulting product could be cheaper due to concentration effects impacting positively e.g. on transport costs and nutritional effects (e.g. satiation efficiency, nutritional energy supply efficiency) the latter may be of specific relevance in developing countries but also in domains like sports nutrition53.
  5. No. 7 (Digestibility) is seen as a key part of a promising development which is expected to lead to more evidence-based correlations and finally to functional relationship insights between the quality of food products at the point of purchase (POP) and digestion as well as metabolic response characteristics, which in turn will provide a quantitative base for next step correlations and functional dependency derivations concerning obesity and related health risk aspects.
  6. Thus, the IF&PC scheme suggested by this report is expected to have the potential to pave the way for an appropriate prospective consideration of processing impacts on food product quality in a holistic manner. For such a holistic approach, which will enable addressing a number of quality criteria Qi for formulated and processed food products, the obvious question is whether an associated multi-parameter classification can still be communicated to the consumer. In this regard, it will generally be possible to use a coding system (e.g. QR) to call up the classification results for various quality criteria Q1 to Qn of a product and to clearly visualize related scores. The weighting of the various Qi should be left to the discretion of the product developers and ultimately the consumers.
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