As food is key element in ensuring good health status, it is very important to understand the determinants of the healthy diets, in particular how to develop tailored food products. Such an approach will ensure sustainable food choices and developing high-quality, safe, healthy and sustainable food products. In such an environment, IBA’s mission is to address societal challenges by elaboration, implementation and dissemination of knowledge through research, education and services within the food system and to increase the quality of life and wellbeing by providing healthy, sustainable and affordable food.

IBA’s research directions include: food safety, food nutrition, food (bio)technologies and consumer science. Since its foundation in 2001, the institute has been growing mainly acting as a developer of research to improve food quality and safety in Romania, through national and EU research and innovation projects. IBA plays an important role in developing national food policies by providing expert advice to authorities, thus actively contributing to various policy debates and research based plans. IBA provides innovative solutions for new products/technologies in strict cooperation with food business operators. Besides the research activity, the institute also carries out third party services which consists of: laboratory analysis, personalized food production for consumers with special nutritional needs as well as food supplement notifications. IBA holds ISO 17025 accreditation for assessing quality and safety of foodstuffs. IBA is a National Node in a future European distributed research infrastructure dedicated to providing metrology services in food and nutrition for the enhancement of food quality and safety, METROFOOD-RI.

>> IBA Bucharest is a public-owned self-financing research organization, in coordination of the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitalization.

Laboratories and Pilot plants for food research

The existing 9 research laboratories (Food Chemistry-Colloidal Biochemistry; Chromatography; Human Nutrition; Food packaging; Microbiology; Molecular biology; Consumer Sciences and Sensory analysis; NMR and Reference Materials & Interlaboratory Comparisons) and 3 pilot plants (Cereals processing; Meat processing; Fruits and vegetables processing) have suitable infrastructures and appropriate conditions for carrying out high level research activities and technological research experiments as well as technology transfer activities. Some of IBA’s competences:

• Studies on the influence of factors on the formation of acrylamide in bread, biscuits etc.
• Determination of the patulin content in apple juice
• Research on thermal transitions in foodstuffs by differential scanning calorimetry
• Establishing the shelf life of food products
• Case studies regarding the level of mycotoxin contamination of food chains
• Detection and quantification of gliadin in food products – for free gluten products labelling
• Case studies regarding microbiological risks in food processing to ensure hygiene in processing areas
• Testing the antimicrobial activity of natural antimicrobial agents
• Evaluation of specific contaminants of food products (bacteria and moulds)
• Evaluation of specific migrants from food packaging (formaldehyde, bisphenol A, heavy metals)
• Case studies regarding the degree of contamination with heavy metals of food products
• Microbial ecology studies by RT-PCR
• Determining the species of meat in the food products
• Identification of food allergens
• Molecular genetics methods for the detection, identification and quantification of genetically modified organisms and microorganisms etc.

The main nutritional, quality and safety analysis include: 

• macronutrients (protein, fat, carbohydrate fiber) and energy value
• minerals
• fatty acid profile
• amino acid content
• rheological properties
• heavy metals
• mycotoxins
• acrylamide
• analysis of food contact materials (migration test, barrier properties etc.)
• microbiological analysis: yeasts and moulds, coliform bacteria, Listeria monocytogenes, Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, Salmonella, Bacillus cereus, Enterobacteriaceae etc.
• sensory analysis (quantitative descriptive tests and consumer tests)

Role in the Up4Food project

IBA will lead the WP4-New food concepts development. The overall aim of WP4 is to design model food concepts including the new ingredients, to facilitate the introduction and the acceptance of new ingredients obtained from the studied side-streams into the food sector, enhancing the nutritional quality of the designed food products.

IBA will be involved in all the other work packages, including also communication and dissemination of the results. IBA will contribute to the integral analysis of the side-streams from oil seeds processing and their characterization from chemical, nutritional, microbiological as well as contaminants (mycotoxins) point of view. IBA will process the side-streams to obtain high value ingredients using various technologies (for instance, hot air, lyophilization, ultrasound-assisted extraction). For the new food ingredients developed in the project, digestibility and cytotoxicity assessments will be conducted. Besides the complete nutritional characterization of the new developed food products, consumer acceptance studies will be achieved within IBA’s Sensory Analysis Laboratory with expertise gained in several previous projects. IBA will provide data for the WP dealing with Food system approach and sustainability as well as for the WP handling with Consumer acceptability and knowledge barriers.

IBA will host the mid-term meeting in 2025.

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