Search

The interplay between inflexible habits and flexible goal-directed control can be modelled in lab-settings using the slips-of-action task. In this task, participants are required to selectively respond to still-valuable outcomes while suppressing responding towards no-longer valuable outcomes, thereby overriding learned stimulus-response associations. Here we examined in the slips-of-action task whether learnt habits can be changed using a planning technique - so-called implementation intentions - whereby people instruct themselves to enact a certain behaviour (or not) in the presence of a specific critical stimulus. Such simple 'if-then' instructions have previously been shown to support behavioural change in real-life settings, possibly because people verbally create new stimulus-response associations. Across four experiments we manipulated the intrinsic value of the stimuli and outcomes in the slips-of-action task: abstract stimuli and outcomes (Experiment 1), snack food stimuli and outcomes (Experiment 2), or a combination of both types (Experiment 3-4). Implementation intentions improved the ability to suppress previously learnt responses towards no-longer-valuable abstract outcomes (Experiment 1 and 3). However, when snacks were used as outcomes (Experiment 2 and 4) no beneficial effect of implementation intentions versus goal intentions was observed. The slips-of-action task is thus sensitive to planning techniques under certain circumstances. Yet, the absence of effects when using snacks as outcomes implies the possible importance of its hedonic outcome value for implementation intentions' effectiveness, which warrants further investigation.

This chapter introduces a series of common sweet potato snacks, including sweet potato chips, roast sweet potatoes, sweet potato biscuit, dried sweet potato slices, sweet potato cakes, doughnuts, extruded sweet potato snacks, etc., and the packaging thereof. It starts by presenting an overview of sweet potato-related products, and then focuses on a series of common snack foods by presenting the concept, classification, main raw ingredients, preparation methods, and the effects on their quality of the addition of different sweet potato proportions. It then introduces the influence of packaging material and packaging systems on the stability of sweet potato snack foods. By the end of the chapter, the trends and prospects of sweet potato snack foods are presented.

Snacks are an important part of our diet and constitute one of the fastest growing segments of the food industry. The rapid expansion of snack food products along with the increasing demand for tailor-made food products can ensure the establishment of innovative meat snacks in the market. This fact provides better opportunities for the meat industry personnels, consumers, as well as professionals. The focus of the meat snack industry is to improve the quality and stability of traditional meat snacks or to launch novel products with enhanced nutritional value, functional attributes, more convenient packaging, and improved sensory properties such as flavor, aroma, taste, etc.

This chapter provides an overall introduction to the sweet potato. It starts with a general description of the sweet potato. It then summarizes the characteristics of the starch, protein, dietary fiber, pectin, lipids, polyphenols, and carotenoids of the sweet potato. At the end of the chapter, information on sweet potato staple products and snack foods is presented.

Sprouting and fermentation, both complex biological processes involving many biochemical and physiological reactions, lead to significant changes in the nutrient composition and physicochemical properties of grains. In general, controlled sprouting and fermentation processes of grain can lead to a final product with improved nutritional value, sensory properties, safety, stability, and functional qualities. Fermented foods prepared from sprouted grains are common in many parts of the world and are used as breakfast or snack foods, beverages, seasonings, weaning foods, and so on. This paper lists and summarizes some of the most common sprouted grains and their basic fermented products. In addition, some of the nutritional and functional properties of those foods and the technological improvements which have been achieved on their production will be highlighted.

Snacks represent a food that has gained great popularity due to changes in lifestyles in recent years and to the fact that many people now have less time to spend eating. There are different kinds of snack products which may be classified according to: (i) raw materials used in their production (vegetables, fruits, restructured dough, etc.) and (ii) unit operations used for their manufacture (frying, baking, extrusion, roasting, etc.). Potato crisps are the star product among the commercial snacks. This article briefly discusses the main quality characteristics of potato snacks, giving an overview of the most important aspects of their production and quality attributes. Current challenges in snack industry focus on producing healthier snacks (reducing the amount of fat, sodium and sugar, principally) without losing the typical quality characteristics of these products.

Food by definition consists of protein, carbohydrate, and fat used by the body to sustain growth, maintain, and support vital processes. Snack foods are considered healthy if they have less fats and less salt. Snacks, as they become part of regular meal, have a major role in everyday diet. Snacks that have no nutritional value are considered as junk. Consumption of these unhealthy snacks can result in obesity, hypertension, and cardiovascular diseases. Research data have discovered that junk snack food is one of the prime reasons for obesity among people in developed countries. There is growing awareness among consumers in the developed countries to eat healthier and more natural snacks. Among the different food processing technologies, extrusion is a versatile technology that can be used for making healthier snacks. Extrusion cooking helps to reduce the antinutritional factors in food, increases the nutritional stability, and creates new products using traditional and novel ingredients. Extrusion system helps to develop third-generation snacks that are nutrient-rich and result in a product with long shelf life and high bulk density and can be transported long distances more cost-effectively. These extruded products can be consumed by frying, microwaving, or hot-air frying. Currently, snack industries are using enrichment and fortification methods that improve the nutritive value and are also focusing on using salt replacements and mono- and polyunsaturated fats to create healthier snacks. Many health agencies are recommending to the consumer to eat healthier snacks that are more plenty in fruits and vegetables.

Snacks are ready-to-eat foods commonly high in oil and flavored with salty flavorings. From the processing viewpoint, they are manufactured by a broad array of processes. The simplest category, also named first-generation snacks, is produced from popcorn, peanuts, nuts, dehydrated fruits, and related items. Most snacks fall into the second-generation snack category that includes simple formed products obtained after direct extrusion (corn chips, puffed or expanded corn products, balls, and curls) or by cutting/sheeting/forming such as regular-fabricated potato chips, tortilla chips, and pretzels. Third-generation snacks are produced from extruded pellets that are commonly fried and flavored. Regardless of the bad image among dietitians, snacks are increasing in popularity due to their flavor, their convenience, and change of food habits. The new trend is the development of nutritious and health-promoting snacks.

This article deals with different aspects of snack food production. It covers the areas of snacking patterns, types of snacks, raw material for snack foods, and different snack food-manufacturing details. This is intended to be useful for the snack food industry and for marketing professionals to understand different types of snack and trends and for consumers who wish to gain more knowledge about snacks.

Fruits, vegetables, legumes, and nuts contain significant antioxidants that offer great potential as protective foods. This beneficial effect of fruits and vegetables can be attributed to the antioxidant capacity of the polyphenolic compounds. Some of the fruit and vegetable processing by-products are rich in antioxidants. Identification of ways to incorporate the by-products as health food ingredients in the human diet could provide many health benefits. Better use of the by-products will also provide benefits to the food industry as well as solutions for environment concerns associated with waste disposal. The effect of thermal processing of snack food industry on the antioxidant activity and phytochemical stability is commodity dependent. In general, mild heat treatment increases antioxidant activity and the levels of total anthocyanins and phenolics. However, severe thermal treatment decreases the antioxidant activity and the phytochemical contents. Maillard reaction intermediate products produced during baking or frying processes have antioxidant activity. The increase of commercially available snack foods containing antioxidant claims is increasing. Many of these new snacks fall into the bar or ready-to-eat cereal category, and they are making use of ingredients that have naturally high antioxidant contents such as dried fruits, nuts, cereals, and chocolate. Many of these products are being marketed to a health-focused target audience, but more mainstream products, including those being produced by many major global food companies, are now being launched.

SUMMARY Mesoamerica is the cradle of corn and its wide array of nixtamalized foods. Corn developed from teosintle, and its cultivation was greatly responsible for transforming indigenous people into progressive farmers. In order to improve its eating qualities and nutritional value, the Indians cooked corn kernels with a leachate of wood ashes or lime. The cooked corn kernels were tender and easier to mill into a dough that was the backbone for production of an ample array of foods. Notably, nixtamalization enhanced the nutritional profile of the foods, especially in terms of supplying the needed calcium that was scarce in their diets. Modern nixtamalized products are industrially manufactured following the same procedures used by the Aztecs but with high-output equipment. Today, tortillas and related products are produced from either fresh masa or dry masa flour (DMF). The technology of DMF production was developed by Mexican entrepreneurs in the middle of the twentieth century and soon became the preferred technology for adoption of nixtamalized products in developed countries. The advantage of using DMF is that it readily yields wet masa after a few minutes of blending with water and thus expedites the manufacturing of finished products. The most relevant nixtamalized product has been the tortilla, which is still the single most-consumed food among Mexicans. The production of masa and tortillas originated the second-most-popular snack foods consumed nowadays: fried corn and tortilla chips. An exchange of corn and wheat occurred after Columbus discovered America in 1492 and the conquistador Cortes subjugated the Aztecs in 1521. Mexican cuisine soon adopted wheat and developed wheat tortillas, which were preferred by the Spaniards. Their industrial production exploded when North Americans adopted and massively produced wheat tortillas during the second part of the past century. Today, both corn in the form of tortillas and related snacks and wheat flour tortillas are manufactured and sold all over the world.

The food colourants industry provides a full range of colours to suit all applications. The primary aim of this chapter is to present the applications of colourants in bakery products, snack foods, dry soup mixes, and seasonings. All potential synthetic and natural colourants are described with regard to their capacity to provide foodstuffs with improved colour characteristics to meet the technical requirements of the food industry. The factors that affect applicability, stability, and processing are demonstrated with reference to specific examples.

Extrusion is a common process in converting raw materials into a variety of popular products such as snack foods and breakfast cereals. The basic principles of extrusion rely on describing the flow of extrudates. Mathematical expressions are developed to determine volumetric flow rate, an important operational parameter that describes the operating capacity of an extruder. Different extrusion systems used in the food industry include cold extrusion and extrusion cooking with single-screw and twin-screw extruders. The power requirements of an extruder depend upon the properties of product and extrudate, and the design characteristics of the extruder.

Aromatic rice, grown widely in small quantities, is highly prized and used for special occasions. Those rices grown traditionally in south Asia belong to Group V of Glaszmann’s genetic classification and type IV of Bhattacharya’s quality classification. Those outside this zone belong to either Group I (indica) or Group VI (japonica) (quality types V and VII of Bhattacharya, respectively). Of these, basamati rices of India and Pakistan and jasmine rice of Thailand are now well known due to international trade. Basmati has probably the longest and the most slender rice grain in the world, shows extreme grain elongation and ‘ring’ formation during cooking, and has a unique distal-end grain shape. Waxy rice is the staple in northern Thailand and Laos. It is also widely grown and used for special dishes and snack foods. Coloured rice is considered to have medicinal and special physiological properties.

This chapter investigates the health benefits of whole grains in the production of ready-to-eat expanded snacks. Extrusion technology is a popular and widely used continuous food processing technique that presents a great opportunity to produce ready-to-eat snacks with improved nutritional qualities. The incorporation of whole grains into expanded products has a beneficial effect in terms of dietary fibre, proteins, phytochemicals and vitamins, but it can also affect the physicochemical characteristics of the final product. Depending on the type of grain used, the product formulation and the extrusion conditions, considerable degradation could occur in terms of sensory appeal. Extrusion technology provides several ways in which these challenges can be overcome, by controlling extrusion conditions such as temperature, solid feed rate and screw speed combinations, and these will be discussed in this chapter.

Dairy industry, an ever-growing business with its innovative products such as vitamin-enriched, organic and convenience/snack foods, has generated significant demand for high-standard dairy machinery in recent years. One or two evaporators are generally used as dewatering devices in the dairy industry, in order to concentrate milk, whey and whey protein, and also lactose prior to drying. This article provides a basic description of the types of evaporators that are implemented in the dairy industry today. Every evaporator design will have a means of transferring heat energy through a heat transfer surface as well as a means to effectively separate the vapors from the residual liquid or solid. Differences in how these are achieved distinguish one type of evaporator from another. The different types of evaporators presented are the plate evaporators, the rising or falling thin-film evaporators, the scraped-surface evaporators, and the single- and multiple-effect thermal vapor recompression or mechanical vapor compression evaporators. Basic equations that apply for their design are also given.

The primary proteins in milk, casein and the whey proteins α-lactalbumin and β-lactoglobulin, have a number of health benefits and desirable functional properties. In a twin-screw extruder, mechanical shear forces, heat, and pressure cause considerable changes in the molecular structures of the dairy proteins, a process known as texturization. These changes further impart unique functional properties to dairy proteins, resulting in new protein-based food ingredients. The new functional behavior depends on the extent of texturization and the degree of structural change imparted and is controlled by adjusting parameters such as extrusion temperature and moisture level. Such texturized proteins can be used to produce puffed high-protein snacks. Softer gels and expanded structures can be made using supercritical fluid extrusion and cold extrusion, techniques that avoid elevated temperatures, minimizing possible damage to the nutritive components and functionality of the texturized dairy proteins. The uses of the texturized dairy ingredient in food products with improved functionality and enhanced nutritive profiles are presented.

Publisher Summary This chapter is an essay on the global potato-processing industry from the personal perspective of a former agro R&D manager in a major snack food company. During the authors' employment of 25 years in the industry, significant expansion has occurred not only in the global market for chips (crisps in the UK) but also for French fries (chips in the UK) and other processed potato products. In the pages that follow, the author has tried to marry his understanding of potato science with a new understanding about markets, based on research undertaken during the preparation of this chapter. According to the Union of the European Processing Companies, in 2002 the process accounted for 2 million tons of potato utilization in the EU. The history of potato processing covers this part elaborately. Global production and consumption, trends, and drivers are summarized under current dimensions. Potato-processing companies and locations are also outlined. The situation described has an important bearing on the future volume expansion in the international trade of frozen potato products. A continuing potato supply of acceptable quality for processing into chips and French fries is critical to success. Supply chain and variety requirements are the titles of potato supply whereas potato cost covers theory and practice and contracts. A great deal has been written about potato quality requirements for the potato-processing industry. Quality parameters are outlined separately.

Publisher Summary This chapter presents that Low-Moisture Mozzarella Cheese (LMMC) is a rennet-coagulated semi-hard cheese variety that spans an unusually broad compositional range in terms of moisture (about 45-52%) and fat (about 30-50% Fat-in-Dry-Matter (FDM)). The major use of LMMC is as a pizza topping, thus the term pizza cheese is often used interchangeably with LMMC. Functional properties, such as flowability, stretchability, browning, free oil formation, and shreddabilty, constitute essential quality attributes of pizza cheese. Considerable amounts of LMMC are also produced in the form of string cheese for snack food products that are either consumed directly or breaded and deep-fried before eating. String cheese is also used as a filling in stuffed-crust pizza and similar products. Important functional characteristics of string cheese include a fibrous peelable texture, long shelf-life and functional stability during refrigerated storage, and resistance to flow during heating in the case of string cheese made for deep-fried and stuffed-crust products. Commercial manufacturing procedures for LMMC vary considerably, which is not surprising given its wide range of chemical composition and applications.

Publisher Summary Deep fat frying as an independent business began in the late 1890s, primarily to produce potato chips as a snack food. Initially, the chips were fried in open kettles heated on kitchen stoves. As the businesses grew, production moved from home kitchens to garages and later to small factories. When the first factories were built, the same open-kettle concept was used to build freestanding fryers. Fryers were simple in design, consisting of square, rectangular, or round kettles fitted with open gas burners. Brick fireboxes and air blowers were later added to increase combustion efficiency and direct heat to the bottom of the kettles. In 1929, Freeman McBeth of the J.D. Ferry Co. developed a fryer with a channel design that produced chips in a continuous manner. The introduction of the Ferry continuous potato chip cooker marked a major advance in frying technology and inaugurated frying on an industrial scale. The term “Industrial frying” is used to describe high-volume, deep fat frying conducted as a primary business. Industrial fryers have production capacities ranging from about 300 lb/h to thousands of pounds per hour. Production is normally continuous and highly automated. Large batch-frying operations are included in the industrial frying classification. This chapter reviews the process of industrial frying and describes fryer selection and operating procedures.

Publisher Summary Extrusion cooking is the process of forcing a material to flow under a variety of conditions through a shaped hole (die) at a predetermined rate to achieve various resulting products. There are three major types of extruders used in the food industry; piston extruders, roller-type extruders and screw extruders. Screw extruders utilize single, twin or multiple screws rotating within a metal cabinet called the barrel. The screws convey the material forward and through a small orifice called a die which can take on many shapes and sizes. Extruders are further classified into single and twin screw extruders depending upon the number of screws in the barrel. Extrusion technology is starting to exert itself into all areas of food manufacturing. Several varieties of extruders are available for the productions of all types of RTE cereals, pasta, cereal-based snack foods, pet foods, and aquatic feeds. Processing speed is increased and production costs are reduced significantly. Current research with cooking extruders includes the extrusion of starch and starch/gum mixtures to modify the starch characteristics and possibly forming graft copolymers that would lower the cost of gums currently used in the food industry.

Stir-fried/saute flavors are new creations by the flavor industry. A new technology has been developed to create flavor systems applicable to ethnic foods, frozen entrees, snack foods, soups, etc. In the development, four important steps are involved. First, the analysis of headspace; second, the study of Maillard reactions and precursor formation; third, the heat treatment of the “flavor-base” components and fourth, the blending of the “flavor-base” with other flavor components. These flavors, while natural, require usage levels of 0.2 to 0.5%, are stable and come in oil soluble liquid or powder forms. These developments and future trends are discussed.

This chapter illustrates diet guide nutrient nutri-unit table for various food groups such as beverages; appetizers and snack foods; breads, pastas, and grain products; breakfast items; cooking ingredients and sauces; dairy products and eggs; desserts and sweets; eating out, fast foods; fruits and fruit juices; main dishes; salads; sandwiches and soups; and vegetables.