Sunday 23, education hot picks: Allergy-free food formulation… and what we learned from the Subway azodicarbonamide saga

Sun 22, 10.30am-12pm: ​Before the expo floor opens, we recommend checking out some education sessions.

There are scores of options (click HERE​ for a complete list) but our two hot picks for Sunday are:

Allergen-free food formulation needs, challenges, and solutions - Room 393​

The session will start with an overview of food allergies, the impact of changing populations and diets on food allergies, food manufacturing challenges and regulations available to produce allergen free foods. Then, an allergen-free foods market insights overview will be given. Finally, the product development challenges and solutions with an emphasis on egg-free, gluten-free and dairy-free formulations will be discussed.

Azodicarbonamide: A case study of perceptions of the safety of food ingredients - Room 293-4​

Until recently, most people that didn’t work in the baking industry had never heard of azodicarbonamide, a dough improver approved in the US in bread at 45 ppm, but banned in some other markets. But all that changed on February 4 when blogger Vana Hari, aka ‘the Food Babe’, launched a petition urging Subway and others to ditch it. By February 6, she had 70,000 signatures and scores of firms started scrambling to remove it from their wares. In this session speakers will use the azodicarbonamide story to talk about how different actors in the food system consider risk and why some campaigns are effective and others are not.