VTT

The following report, our last visit in Finland, was written by Laura van Donkelaar.

It was the first rainy morning for us in Helsinki when we left the hostel to go to VTT. VTT is the Finnish institute for technology. Their goal is to work with technologies to add value to products like grains, berries and various agro-biomass sidestreams.

After the introduction presentations, Sami, Kevin, Kasia, Jacqueline and Kashif presented their projects to the group. Kevin managed to keep all interested by saying that his french fries where all over the place and that the frying oil was shooting out of the roof.

Remko in good form

From the discussions after the presentations it became clear that VTT shares our opinion that the food industry should go towards producing functional fractions instead of producing pure component fractions.

After our presentations it was time for a nice salad lunch and a tour through their pilot plants., a dry milling and fractionation area showed to us by Juhani Sibakov, a pilot brewery showed by Brian Gibson and a pilot bakery.

When we got back to the lecture room our part of the symposium was closed by presentations from Jue and Pascalle. Then VTT started their presentations. Timo Moiso talked about the oxidation of encapsulated lipids, Ciara Gasparetti, Dilek Ercili-Lura and Outi Santala presented about the characterisation of enzymes (mainly Tyrosinase) and on enzymatic modifications of ceral bran, brewers spent grain and milk proteins.

Always fun wearing funny clothes

Then it was time to return to the hostel. Some of us took another shot at looking inside the underground church, which was actually still open this time. We even got a chance to listen to a string-quintet practising a very moving piece.

Since the 11 of May is also the birthday of Remko this of course had to be celebrated in the evening.

There was pie, drinks and some very nice confetti for decoration.

After some more drinks and talking it was time to go to bed again for our last night in Helsinki.

Happy birthday Remko!