Now you can drink your caffeine and eat it, too

BY SHIRLEY PERRYMAN

The words caffeine and energy seem to go hand in hand.

If you count on that kick from your caffeine-loaded beverage to jump-start your day or help with brain fog, you can find it just as easily in food.

You can have an oatmeal breakfast such as Morning Spark, a health food typically promoted for heart health that “sparks” your morning with caffeine. For an afternoon snack, grab a caffeinated snack such as NRG caffeinated potato chips or a Snickers Charged bar that contains the same amount of caffeine that you would get in an 8-ounce cup of coffee – 60 milligrams.

This new trend of adding caffeine to food likely started in part because the candy industry is suffering from fewer kids in the population and the increasing awareness of the obesity epidemic in our country. Candy manufacturers have taken to creative marketing and are now targeting adults – their new audience – by loading up their confections with energy-enhancing additives, including caffeine.

In addition to these newly charged choices, caffeine still occurs naturally in some foods, such as coffee beans, cocoa beans, tea leaves and kola nuts.

If it’s now easier to get caffeine in your diet, is it better to be adding more of it? That depends on your perspective.

Really? Yes fish that will swim to a sound and wait for something to happen.

What does that help? – what about fish that can be released into the open sea and which will swim back when called to be harvested.

Yes its real with the advantage being that they will not need feed and their waste will not accumulate as in conventional aquaculture.

Following on my previous blog on the the potential of indigenous fruits in AfricaI today read an article on progress that has been made in Tanzania.

This article lists four trees that are being planted and five, including the baobab, tamirand and marula which are harvested from the wild, that are the focus of increased attention. It identifies the following benefits that have been achieved:

• regional sale of jams and juices generates income

• using fruit to replaces staples such as maize in local brews has improved nutrition
• the use of fruit wine in place of dangerous illicit brews has improved safety

The work has been supported/funded by FARM-Africa and Government agencies which started the work as poverty alleviation and nutritional interventions.

The two difficulties identified are the short harvests and the inability to store unprocessed fruit and the availability of packaging material.

I think this is very promising and am trying to follow up where I can, to try and develop a complete picture of how and what has been achieved. This will help others to benefit from their natural resources. I will also add information on marula from South Africa with time.

I will be looking at what process to use to share the information – in the mean time please leave a comment or contact me with any ideas, thought or information you may have.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VXtKJ4nvZ4&hl=en]

I hope this is not becoming too much of a biofuels blog, but I found this very interesting and was particularly struck by how a quick calculation can bring insight – maybe we need to to this more often in food processing!

While the “energy cost of ethanol” is much more difficult to calculate, the cost of production is much simpler. However, many people talk about the benefits of Ethanol without really knowing what it costs – like any costing it is not an absolute but depends strongly on time and location.

R-Squared Energy Blog has done a great of job of showing how to do a simple calculation of the cost of ethanol, presenting references to the costs he uses.

By comparing the cost of ethanol production to the market price for fuel ethanol he avoided the effect of subsidies. However, it clearly shows that there’s not much margin in the business and that raw material prices (90% of total) is the predominate input cost. This has positive (scientific progress could have significant effects on yield both on farm and in plant) and negative (rising food prices) sides to it and is similar to the biodiesel scenario except that value of oil cake, the byproduct of that process, has a more significant effect on cost, than DDGS. In summary he found:

Times are tough for ethanol producers. This is what the economics roughly look like at $5 per bushel of corn and $8/MMBTU of natural gas. To produce 1 gallon of ethanol requires:

* $1.85 of corn

* $0.33 of energy

* $0.14 of enzymes, yeast, etc.

* $0.23 of labor, maintenance, and various miscellaneous expenses

There is a DDGS credit per gallon of ethanol of $0.55. Thus, the total cost to produce a gallon of ethanol today is $1.85 + $0.33 + $0.14 + $0.23 – $0.55, or exactly $2/gallon of ethanol. For reference, the February contract for ethanol in the Midwest as of this writing is $2.15. And $2/gallon is merely cost of production. It doesn’t take into account any return on investment.

Also note that due to the lower energy content, this production cost is equivalent to a $3 per gallon production cost for gasoline – and that this production cost is a moving target: As long as the ethanol mandates are driving up the price of corn and increasing the demand for and cost of natural gas, corn ethanol producers must chase their tails in a vicious cycle. Producers are going to be hard-pressed to ever match the 2006 windfall that was given to them when the MTBE phaseout drove ethanol prices sky-high.

Croatian Food Scientists have identified Trehalose, a sugar found naturally in mushrooms, honey, lobster and shrimp as a potential food additive. As well as enhancing aroma in processed strawberries it appear to improve the colour, aroma, and the anthocyanin content of the finished fillings.

Since aroma is so closely related to food taste and assuming that this will result if further work focussed on natural food additives, maybe we can look forward to fewer synthetic food additives. I for one, being allergic to MSG, look forward to this.

This article from Alabama Cooperative Extension System is comprehensive and detailed, it unfortunately written for the USA system but should guide an entrepreneur thinking about the food sector.

It mainly a focused narrative that covers the practical processes that need to be addressed with lots of useful detail including costing, product codes, safety and quality and product line planning.

I’n now seeing articles about “fourth generation” biofuels, like the one below from Biopact, while I was still in the second generation.

For those who are maybe as confused as I am, this is how I understand it it.

First Generation – these are the ones we all know and the industry is busy making money out of, turning carbohydrates and oils into ethanol and biodiesel. These are generally economic to do so long as their is some kind of subsidy where the efficiencies are poor eg ethanol from wheat in Europe.

The actual overall energy and environmental benefit of these is under discussion with competing analyses, but is anyway rather marginal. However, the largest negative that is coming through is the fact that in a world with starving people and rising food prices biofuels don’t make a lot of sense.

Second Generation – these are the ones that are doable but are still much too expensive for commercial implementation. They look at using waste products rather than food as their carbon source eg ethanol from maize stalks and biodiesel from flue gas.

Lignin and cellulose are basically the cell wall material of plants and are the most the basis for most of these kinds of processes and are the most plentiful organic compounds in nature eg grass, trees, timber wastes and food crop wastes all rich in lignocelluloses and offer the opportunity to provide biofuels without impacting on food availability.

Third Generation – these are based on the genetic manipulation of plants to produce dedicated energy crops that vastly improve the economics of second generation type conversions eg maize with its own enzymes to convert cellulose and wood with reduced lignin which would be a more efficient producer of ethanol.

These three generations of biofuels are seen to be “carbon neutral” in that they do not add to greenhouse gasses because the CO2 they release on combustion will be extracted from the atmosphere by the plants that are grown to produce the biofuel.

Fourth Generation – these technologies are based on new plants that would be able to absorb more CO2 than would be released on combustion by the biofuels produced from them. They would therefore actively reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

It seems like Yak’s produce a milk that when converted into cheese offers nutritional benefits compared to cow’s milk.

” The higher ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acids found in yak’s cheese would mean it could be “classified as a healthy food in human diets,” state the researchers from the University of Guelph (Canada), the Asia Network for Sustainable Agriculture and Bioresources in Katmandu, and Kantipur City College in Katmandu.

Source: Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry
Volume 56, Pages 1654-1660
“Fatty Acid Composition of yak (Bos grunniens) Cheese Including Conjugated Linoleic Acid and trans-18:1 Fatty Acids”
Authors: M.M. Or-Rashid, N.E. Odongo, B. Subedi, P. Karki, B.W. McBride “

The list below is one of the few comprehensive lists I have seen focussing on the “upper end of small”. Unfortunately its almost 3 years old and I am not sure how up to date it is.

If you have a better list please leave a link to it in the comments.