A Rapid and Cost-Effective Approach to Shelf-Life Testing

Explore the power of data visualisation and fingerprinting in your assessment of product behaviour under inclement conditions. Fingerprints tell the story!

Are you looking to save some time on your shelf-life testing to improve the process and would you like to cut down the cost of the investigation? Then, this course is for you! We all know that we are supposed to conduct shelf-life testing before product introduction but unfortunately, many products go to market today before shelf-life testing is completed or even conducted because the investigation can be overwhelming, time consuming and expensive. The good news is that there are some rapid and cost-effective methods that can give timely insights into the product behaviour over time under diverse conditions of environmental stress allowing for the prediction of shelf-life endpoints to help eliminate the risk of product failure in the marketplace.

This course will introduce you to Shelf-Life Fingerprinting, which streamlines the shelf-life investigations of milk/food products by focusing on the shifts (from gross to subtle) in the product fingerprints under various settings of environmental stress using both temperature and relative humidity as the controlling variables. You need to attend the 3 days to complete the course.

The course is suitable for anyone in a technical role, whether in R&D, quality control, product development/formulation, process design/optimisation, ingredients management or innovation, working on the development of a new product or the assessment of a reformulated product under tight budget.

Designed to provide the product’s complete picture under inclement conditions, the IODY’s A rapid and cost-effective approach to shelf-life testing course will help you expand your skill set in determining how long the product will last and provide you with a comprehensive knowledge of the following topics:

• Shelf-life of milk products – an overview
• The science of shelf-life and food spoilage
• Moisture sorption isotherms and milk powder stability
• Influence of package permeability on shelf-life
• Overview of the rapid shelf-life testing process
• Design of accelerated shelf-life trials for milk products
• Data Measurements and collection
• Qualitative modelling of milk/food industry shelf-life data – A practical example
• Quantitative modelling of milk/food industry shelf-life data – A practical example
• Shelf-life testing data modelling practice

Please note that the module titles and their contents are subject to change during program development.

• Learn the science behind shelf-life testing from milk industry experts who have been there and done it.
• Learn how to set up an accelerated shelf-life testing protocol under tight budget and use the data to build a qualitative and quantitative model that will give a clear picture of the product’s expected shelf-life.
• Explore the fingerprint profile shifts in milk/food products stored under various settings of environmental stress to gain an insight into how quality changes over shelf-life and learn new concepts to expand your knowledge and stay ahead of the game.
• Learn how to expand your sphere of influence and become a member of the Institute of Dairy to connect with peers.
• When you complete the course, you will be able to apply enhanced technical skills and work with pride to invent the future. The milk industry is booming, and the right jobs are waiting.

There is no prerequisite for this course. However, it is suitable for anyone in a technical role (working in a data-driven dairy/food setting) or in academia who wish to enhance their expertise and develop the experience necessary to perform rapid and effective accelerated shelf-life trials under tight budget to help reduce product’s time to market.

Course Admissions Requirements

Completion of a bachelor’s degree in a relevant field of study. Otherwise, the completion of the IODY’s Predicting Milk/Food Quality with Chemometrics course is mandatory.

Completion of the pre-course assignment prior to the course.

Please note that if there are more applications for this course than places available, applicants will be ranked by date of application.

Earn a Certificate of Completion from The Institute of Dairy

100% attendance qualifies you for a certificate of completion from The Institute of Dairy to recognise your participation.

Institute of Dairy reserves the right to cancel an upcoming training without further notice. All registrations will be refunded in full.
Cancellations will be refunded in full up to 14 days from date of registration. After this, no refunds will be given. However, a voucher, valid for one year, that is worth the equivalent of the original training may be issued to the participant in the extreme case that he can no longer participate in the training that he had initially registered for due to unforeseen circumstances.