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An interview with Kevin C. Kenny, Chief Operating Officer, Decernis, LLC. FMD: Tell our readers about your company. What's your main line of business? KCK: Decernis is a Washington D.C.-based information company that provides regulatory compliance data across 165 countries globally, including food standards, food additives, food contaminants, and food packaging. Our product line includes a searchable reference database containing 70,000 regulations, a red-light/green light application for evaluating formulations and substances across multiple regions and countries, a daily regulatory news service providing company- specific content and issue analysis, and a supply chain management system for auto- mated management of all documents from suppliers related to compliance. FMD: What would you say makes your company unique? DECERNIS: CUSTOMIZED SOLUTIONS FOR GLOBAL COMPLIANCE An interview with Roger Daniels, Vice President, Research, Development and Innovation, Stratas Foods. FMD: Your team of highly trained scientists and technicians at the Research, Development & Innovation Center at Stratas are constantly striving to develop and test the latest innovations in shortening and oil technologies. What is the most important issue they are looking at today? RD: The team is focused in three key areas: smart saturates, or promoting structure in bakery products with reduced levels of saturates; simplified solutions, or identifying alternatives for conventional additives; and nutritional wildcards, or omega 3, 6, and 9 balanced liquid oil solutions and partial hydro functional shortenings without negatives. FMD: We live in a culture that is growing more and more health conscious each year. How much of a focus does research at Stratas have on health issues? Mike Pearsall, Director of Food Safety for UL DQS, spent some time talking with Food Magic Daily recently about how his company can help yours identify and manage risks. FMD: Tell us a little bit about you and what you do. MP: Our business at UL DQS is in training, certification, and auditing of risks asso- ciated with food production and packaging. Right now, certification of packaging materials is a matter of great concern, both to food processors and their safety pro- fessionals but also to consumers in general. Every time a story hits the news about a new study that shows that this chemical or that can be leached from packaging mate- rials into the food inside, new questions are raised that you want to be in a position to answer. That lowers your risks in the marketplace and your organization. When you lower your risk, you lower your chances of going out of business because of something that you didn't foresee but that our experience has trained us to notice early, before it's a major problem. Foods requiring a replacement to animal fats have been tradition- ally made using trans fats for their ability to provide product qual- ity and shelf stability at a relatively low cost. In baked goods, these fats are able to effectively incorporate air when mixed with dry ingredients, achieving the desirable texture and flavor in fin- ished products. Over the last several years however, increasing attention has been focused upon the negative health effects of trans fat. Intake of trans fat – which can be found in foods such as packaged foods, fried foods and certain vegetable shortenings or margarines – have been shown to lead to increased cardiovascular disease risk. As the global move- ment among food manufacturers to remove unhealthy trans fat from foods continues, many food products require an alternative solid fat as a replacement in order to get the same desirable functional and textural qualities. Increasingly, most manufacturers are turning to palm oil as a healthier natural alternative to trans fat. "The greatest benefit of palm oil is that it has the same functional properties as trans fat so it may be effectively substituted without the health problems associated Continued on Page 29 Continued on Page 29 STRATAS FOODS PUSHES RESEARCH, DEVELOPMENT, INNOVATION UL DQS: TRAINING AND AUDITING FOR RISK MANAGEMENT PALM OIL OFFERS A HEALTHIER ALTERNATIVE Continued on Page 29 Continued on Page 29 O s e r C o m m u n i c a t i o n s G r o u p C h i c a g o Tu e s d a y, J u l y 1 6 , 2 0 1 3 AN INDEPENDENT PUBLICATION NOT AFFILIATED WITH IFT