Department of Food Safety

The Department of Food Safety includes the Professorship for Food Safety, led by Professor Simone Loos-Theisen and the Professorship for Beverage Technology, led by Professor Bernd Lindemann.

The Department of Food Safety's activities focus on two main subject areas:

1.       Issues concerning the safety, conformity and legality of foodstuffs
2.       Beverage technology with a focus on brewing and coffee roasting

Activities range from developing and improving analytical methods, investigating food production processes and identifying ingredients.

Brewery technology covers a wide range of topics concerning the process engineering of beer production, the analysis of ingredients as well as the extraction and processing of by-products. One focus is research into the filterability of beer.

Research on foodstuffs is concerned with developing rapid detection methods for quality and safety-relevant ingredients in food products. For example, allergenic proteins in various food products are investigated in a wide range of manufacturing processes.

The Department has the following technical facilities at its disposal for research activities:

• Filling equipment for bottles and kegs
• Baking machinery
• Breweries (conventional, manual; semi-automatic in line with GLP standards, modern purification technology – dynamic  screen filtration)
• Distillery
• Melangeur
• Detection methods (imlogy, nutritional microbiology, protein chemistry)
• Oil screw press
• Percolators
• Roasters (drum roasters, fluid bed roaster)
• Sensory analysis device
• Spray-drying equipment

The Department is strongly integrated in the Food Safety and Beverage Technology degree programs and includes the management of the Food Safety degree program.  In addition, teaching materials are developed for ongoing professional development with a focus on e-learning and blended learning.