News on Food Trends from Belgium

The Service Public de Wallonie has granted a building permit for 'Mydibel Fresh', a new plant in Mouscron for the production of chilled french fries. The construction of Mydibel Fresh is part of the company’s strategy of sustainable development.

The world is currently wasting 1.3 billion tonnes of the food produced
for human consumption every year, which amounts to a third of all food produced for that purpose.

Growers, suppliers, grubbing demonstrations - everything to do with potatoes. That is what the latest edition of Potato Europe was all about. This year, this trade show was held in Doornik/Tournai, Belgium on 4 and 5 September.

TOMRA Sorting Food has introduced the TOMRA 3A sensor-based sorting machine for freshly harvested root crops, offering potato growers unrivalled sorting capabilities, dependability, and affordability.

The last potatoes were planted at the end of April at PotatoEurope’s demo site and until the end of May the participation demands continued to come in. With less than three weeks to go, time for an update!

Waterleau Group NV has successfully executed an important capital increase which secures the ambitious plans of the company for the future.

Sensor-based sorter manufacturer TOMRA offers their insights on the impact of sorting technology on food safety in the Potato Processing Industry

ILVO, HOGENT and TRIAS in Belgium are hosting a Peruvian delegation to the Food Pilot (ILVO, Melle, Belgium) to get the production of so-called “tuntas” (freeze dried potatoes) in a small cooperative factory in the Andes.

Starch Europe Welcomes Lantmännen-Reppe and Viresol as members.

The potato cannot be burned from the news. This week it turned out that Belgian growers are settling in northern France because the Belgian area is almost exhausted.

Based upon a provisional estimation of the NEPG (North-Western European Potato Growers) the area in the 5 largest potato countries increased to 609.000 ha of consumption potatoes, a 2.4% increase.

Since the humble precursor to modern potato first domesticated in Peru 10,000 years ago, the tuber has branched off into thousands of different varieties.

Supermarkets of the near-future will have their business models radically re-shaped by innovations instore, online, and in the food industry supply chain.

Three Belgian organisations, Boerenbond, Belgapom and VITO are teaming up to strengthen the future of the Belgian potato chain by jointly investing in the online data platform WatchITgrow.

Last Friday, the European Standing Committee on Plants, Animals, Food and Feed, mostly referred to as ScoPAFF voted an a proposal to ban Chlorpropham (or CIPC), widely used in the potato industry as sprout inhibitor during potato storage.

El curso es organizado por el Instituto de Divulgación de Biotecnología Vegetal (IPBO). Va dirigido a estudiantes, investigadores y profesionales del sector público e privado, que estén involucrados en programas locales de mejoramiento de cultivos (papa)

The European Commission has set an EU-wide objective for all packaging to be recyclable or reusable by 2030. However there is no easy packaging solution (yet) for manufacturers of potato chips.

RMA Techniek has combined their capabilities in robotics, smart engineering and experience in the potato processing industry in a unique way: the company has specialized in the automated quality assessment of potatoes and shows its progress at Interpom.