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Appraisal
and
evaluation:
Dr. Michael Blumenthal's work has spanned an extremely wide array of contributions to, and
studies of, the chemical sciences, and in particular as they apply to the products of agriculture and
their manufacture into food products. He has been a member and leader of research teams
creating key processes fundamental to food processing today. At Libra Technical Center, his
work has directly affected more than 500 companies for which he and his colleagues have
consulted and performed laboratory research and analyses. More than 400 organizations have
used the new rapid testing technology to improve quality control and process economics.
In the last 30+ years, Dr. Blumenthal has directed operations resulting in more than 500 industrial
consulting reports available on-line within Libra, in addition to his publications and private industry
reports, and he has overseen the preparation of more than 1000 on-line analytical reports for a
global customer base. Thus he has founded an enterprise in which independent science can be
conducted confidentially and with an enormous database of recorded knowledge and experience
behind it, as well as an enterprise that creates new technologies and new products for application
of chemical principles to better foods, fats, and oils. Dr. Blumenthal's experience and ability to
understand and translate extremely complex chemical systems into elegant, reliable, simple tools
is a very rare combination.
His
new Paradigm of Frying
is not only a creative and powerful achievement in a specific area of
food chemistry, but also serves as a model for an approach to solving problems in the complex
world of the total chemical events which occur in a living system from agriculture which is brought
into an engineering / manufacturing environment. He has shown the way for an extremely useful
strategy for converting chemical principles to the economics of food production.
The
power
to
predict
is one of the most compelling aspects of Dr. Blumenthal's contributions.
Both the Frying Paradigm and the Solventless Chemistry technology are a direct outgrowth of the
pathway that began with Dr. Blumenthal's studies on saliva, as part of a cystic fibrosis project.
This study enabled an understanding of physiology and the limitations of sensory work. In his
Master's Degree research on onion flavor chemistry, Dr. Blumenthal was able to understand what
to look at when doing mathematical pattern recognition. In his Ph.D. research, he was able to
achieve an unparalleled degree of correlation of instrument measurement with the human
sensory experience: by the use of computerized pattern recognition methods, he was able to
achieve nearly perfect prediction of the sensory evaluation by using only
2 peaks
from a complex
flavor chromatogram. The technique he developed is now used by the most advanced flavor
houses in the creation of natural-tasting and -smelling analogs made from synthetic materials.
The
New
Paradigm
of Deep-Fat Frying has taken thousands of chemical events, in all the
numerous combinations and permutations of oils, foods, frying systems, environments,
personnel, etc., and reduced the measurements needed to predict food quality, shelf-life, oil
usage, and so on, to only
3
tests,
one of which (Total Polar Materials) has regulatory applications
in Europe, where the oil must be discarded before it reaches the statutory limit, and yet for which
the corresponding laboratory procedure is so prohibitive in its cost, time, and expertise required,
that only after-the-fact compliance can be established.
Through Libra's
Solventless Chemistry
technology, these 3 tests can be performed by anyone,
anywhere, anytime, to achieve true process and quality control. They allow the prediction of food
quality, shelf-life of packaged foods, and process economics, all from the oil's condition. They put
safe, simple and accurate measurement systems in the hands of those who must make decisions
before things go wrong. The technology can be extended to an enormous array of applications
and solves many of the problems that prevent easy and frequent chemical measurements and
AOAC OMB Teleconference Materials
165
11/09/2016