Food technologist Remko Boom wins lifetime achievement award

It’s the 1990s, and a recently promoted dr. Remko Boom is working fully focused behind a computer. Food technology is not yet on his radar. Instead, at Unilever, he is simulating how dirty laundry and detergent move around inside a washing machine. He simplifies textiles into tiny spheres, connected by springs. Each sphere has openings through which soapy water can flow, rinsing out the dirt. He presses ‘enter’ on his computer and the spheres start to move. The computer accurately predicts which type of detergent penetrates deep into the clothing or what happens when the washing machine is overloaded with laundry.

Digital laundry

When Boom was asked in 1998 to swap Unilever for a professorship in food technology at Wageningen University & Research (WUR), he was hesitant at first. “I thought: what do I know about food?” Boom says in his office. Now, more than 25 years later and still a chairholder, he has no regrets. His face lights up when he talks about food technology. “The beauty of it is that there are many similarities with my background in microstructures,” Boom explains. “If you zoom in far enough on food like bread or a meat substitute, you will see it also reveals a porous microstructure. I worked on such structures during my PhD as well.” Because of his unconventional background, Boom thinks differently about food than the average food technologist. “Surprising combinations, like applying knowledge and methods from other fields, sometimes lead to wonderful outcomes.”

One such surprising combination emerged shortly after he moved to WUR. He discovered that his computer programme for washing machines could do more than just simulate laundry cycles. In the Wageningen lab, researcher Arjen Rinzema and his PhD student Maarten Schutyser were growing fungi on cereal grains. To provide the microbes with enough oxygen, they let the grains rotate in a kind of drum. How fun, thought Boom, that looks like a washing machine. So, he brought out his computer programme; it turned out it could also be used for this fermentation process. “The computer showed precisely where oxygen could reach and how the released heat accumulated and spread,” says Boom. “This helped us better understand the process, and we then used the programme to scale up the system for the industry.”

Crazy ideas

As of today, Remko Boom joins the ranks of 22 other renowned chemical technologists. “I was completely surprised and had to catch my breath when I heard the news,” Boom says. “At first, I thought they just wanted to nominate me, but I had already won.” The lifetime achievement award is a major recognition for Boom and his field. “Food technology was not always highly valued within chemical sciences,” he explains. “Maybe because we do not work with pure substances like traditional chemistry. But I believe that this complexity is what makes our field so interesting,” he adds with a smile. This award shows that food technology is gaining more recognition and is now a fully-fledged part of chemical sciences.

Boom views the complexity in his field as a challenge. The fact that he does not limit himself to research methods and habits in just one discipline helps with that. “I like doing strange, unexpected things,” Boom says with a broad smile. Look at our entire food production system, he says. There is much to gain from how we make ingredients from crops, and that can be achieved by thinking a bit outside the box. According to Boom, to feed the growing world population, we should focus not so much on producing more food, but on designing more efficient food production processes. “Extracting ingredients like proteins from crops using traditional production processes is inefficient because we focus too much on purifying them.”

“Take soybeans,” Boom explains. “In the industry, we grind them into flour and dissolve it in water. Then we first remove the starch by centrifuging the mixture and later adjust the acidity with chemicals to make the proteins sink to the bottom.” It is a decent method to separate these substances, but some protein always remains where you do not want it. In the end, the industry isolates only 40 to 60 percent of the protein using large amounts of water and chemicals. “What is more, after the process, you are left with wastewater full of ‘contaminants’ like starch and protein residues that could have been used,” the professor says. So, he thought, if water is so precious and the waste stream is harmful to the environment, maybe we should try doing it without water.”

Blowing

How can such a complex separation process be done without water and chemicals? “It is actually very simple: you blow on it,” Boom says. He compares it to a handful of pebbles and sand. Toss them into the air and blow hard. The sand grains will be carried away by the wind, while the larger pebbles fall straight down. The same principle applies to food: starch consists of large ‘grains’, while protein is small and light and is carried by the wind. By blowing air through ground food crops, you can separate the two. “Of course, you will not get completely pure fractions that way,” Boom says. But our foods are rarely pure. Bread is a mixture of starch and protein, and even a meat substitute is not purely protein. “You will still need to add other ingredients anyway, so why separate them first?” says Boom.

The reason the industry invests so much in making pure products, Boom believes, has to do with consistency. “This way, companies can produce the exact same products in factories all over the world, with the same taste, composition, and texture.” Pure products also do not contain antinutrients – substances that hinder the absorption of vitamins and minerals or are unhealthy in other ways. The blowing technology from Boom’s group does not yet remove all those substances. “Together with nutritionists, we are figuring out how much of these substances are in the final product and how we can remove them with mild methods,” Boom says. “Artificial intelligence might give us a helping hand here.”

Besides artificial intelligence, Boom is also inspired by other societal developments, such as our vehicles. In the 19th century, the first steam train (powered by heat) ran, in the 20th century came combustion engines, and now we are increasingly driving on electricity. “The funny thing is that in the food industry, we are still stuck in 19th-century technology: heat,” says Boom. Making powders or drying products almost always involves heat. But that consumes enormous amounts of energy, so it needs to change, according to Boom. “Even in food, we can replace heat with electricity. Apply a current to a mixture, and it pulls the water out.” Boom’s group is now developing a range of new, electrically driven drying and separation processes that are energy-efficient.

Fishing in the waste bin

Boom wants to be surprising not only in the lab, but in his lectures too. He notices that his way of inspiring others with funny combinations works. In his view, students have an even better sense for new things than established researchers. He sees this in the lecture hall but also in his lab, when a PhD student was trying to recreate cheese by mixing different proteins and fats. One experiment failed, so she threw the result into the waste bin. A master’s student happened to glance into the bin and thought, ‘hey, that looks like meat,’ and fished the mixture back out. “That ended up being the starting point for our now large-scale research into meat analogues (meat substitutes),” Boom says.

From laundry detergent research to revolutionary techniques in food technology, looking back on his career, Boom is proud of his research, but perhaps what he values most is educating and inspiring bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD students. “If I can contribute to their lives and their motivation for sustainability through lectures or interactions, that is one of the greatest successes I can achieve.”