Healthy and Sustainable Tomato Products

Healthy and Sustainable Tomato Products

This year Keep Food Simple has started a tomato research and development project. It focuses on improving the bio-availability of nutrients in tomatoes by applying different types of processing. In so doing we aim to reduce waste and find more sustainable and innovative ways to process tomatoes into healthy and tasty products.
As a part of her MSc Internship Food Quality and Design (Wageningen University and Research), Tania Utami has made a comprehensive literature study of our knowledge of available processing methods and their influence on the quality of tomato products.

The choice of specific processing methods, such as hot and cold break heating and microwaving, will affect viscosity, flavour, and nutritional content. For instance, because of longer holding times in cold break, endogenous enzymes have time to break down the pectin and the unsaturated fatty acids, which results in lower viscosity and a fresher aroma of the final product. Higher temperatures such as in hot break though, will not only increase the viscosity but also the bio-availability of lycopene, one of the key nutrients in tomatoes.
High pressure processing will lead to an increase of redness, viscosity and the bio-availability of lycopene.

Introducing fermentation as a processing method, in combination with one of the methods mentioned before, will support the development of more digestible products, with specific nutritional benefits and more flavour.

More information on our projects can be found here.