Blog 10 All roads lead to here.

All roads lead to here.

Finally we’ve reached the end. It seems to have flown by and it felt like very little had been achieved but on reflecting back, it couldn’t be further from the truth. Over the course of the module I’ve researched common problems in Ireland, selected a niche specific problem in GI Disorders, researched around them to find the different types of disorders and they’re causes, researched relevant cures, selected an area that was felt functional food could be used as a treatment for these disorders, decided on probiotics as the most effective treatment, researched probiotics to find kefir grains as a rough diamond in the probiotic industry that hasn’t been utilised fully, developed a kefir grain product, designed a bioprocess and bioreactor for this process, made an infographic ( I had no idea what that was), made an eportfolio (I had no idea what that was) and gave a presentation/ teaching class. That reads as a whole lot of work for 12 weeks. And to be perfectly honest if this module had been ran as most others are, I would’ve just sauntered through and crammed for an exam at the end.

I can’t decide whether this new way of learning was easier or harder than our conventional modules, but it was certainly more interesting and kept the process of learning and working continuous from start to finish. There are some aspects of the module that are obviously more constraining than the others but I did find the amount of elements that involved computing and time spent arranging on design website was a bit too much. At times it felt like we were graphic design students.

I still think it’s amazing how forcing someone to stand up in front of a class and teach a topic is a great way to get a person to learn information, but in a completely different way than just memorising for an exam. The infographic was also a great tool, in having to understand a process from start to finish well enough that you can point to relevant points in it and display the process in a manner anyone could understand.

Working as part of a group can go one of two ways; the group push each other to produce good work or a select few do the work and carry another. Thankfully we as a group knew each other well enough to understand the others situations and the push for work was always present.

At the start of the year we were asked our Hopes Fears and Expectations. I hoped that this was a module that I could learn and take an interest in as I had an eye on a future job opportunity and I have to say I really did enjoy and learn a lot over the module, not just in the pure bioprocessing. I had feared that this would turn into a module where the work load was unbearable and that I’d get left behind, that didn’t materialise. I expected to get a decent grade with the layout being given to us along with every grading rubix, but I’ll have to wait and see about that!

Blog 9 Lecturing is Easy

Lecturing is Easy

Final preparation is your own worst enemy when it comes to deliverance day. Every demon enters your head and all the worst outcomes are there. Or maybe that’s just my sheer hatred of presenting shining through. Our final preparation was simply making a few notes and timing our presentation again, we felt ready for once in our lives.

It turned out our presentation was second from last and that was painful. The anxious wait as all the other groups went ahead was a killer. As is natural you think every presentation is better than yours, but the more worrying thing was the calibre of questions being asked. You really needed to know what you were talking about up there. With this in mind, we decided to put our extra time to good use and planted a few questions just so it was not a bombardment of question we couldn’t answer. Having a few answers prepared is a great way to settle the mind.

Time really flies by when you are standing up there presenting and you probably give the same amount of information as you would in an hour and a half exam. Understanding the information well enough to present is completely different to an exam situation though, because there is literally no room for waffling up there and to be able to have a discussion at question time means purely learning off information is not an option.

Our presentation well reasonably well, 68% well to be exact. We had our planted questions answered and were able to answer a few more too which I felt was great. But we did manage to mess up our game a bit, it was our first run at it though so not a complete failure. We were disappointed with our overall mark, we felt we had done a bit better than 68% but then again we’re not experts in presenting.

I actually enjoyed this section of the module and felt that it is a much more appropriate way of learning material, other than memorising for an exam. It really puts a broader scope on what you are learning, other that purely memorising facts. It also teaches an element of preparation, as a task like is 90% preparation and 10% delivering. You cannot just rock up and waffle through a presentation.

Blog 8 Become a teacher inside a week.

Become a teacher inside a week.

I have to take my hat off to Barry and say that the teaching class was a very sly move in terms of our learning as students. As he very well knows it’s nearly impossible to teach a class, or convey a product/idea without fully understanding what you are delivering. It is then even double as tough to answer questions for 5 minutes unless you completely thought the whole process through. This week was probably the most stressful of the whole lot. We hadn’t had many lectures recently due to some other arrangements and the whole thing seemed to fall on top of us. It amazing when you begin to piece a presentation together on a topic you felt you understood only to see there are holes in your understanding everywhere.

The aim of the teaching class was that you must display the whole product, bioprocess and thinking behind it all in 10 minute presentation. This is much more difficult than first imagined. To make a presentation where people won’t fall asleep is also extremely difficult. After a trial run on our presentation we found that it was very monotonous and didn’t show the product in its true light so it was back to the drawing. We penned the idea to reduce some of the science and improve the interaction and deliverance end.

We ended up using less slides, using much more statistics (which sound really good, from listening to other groups presentations), more pictures and we invented a little game “name the ancillaries” a game where the class must label the ancillaries on our bioreactor. By using more statistics we felt that the data was much more relatable to people who mightn’t have an interest in the Food Science area and the game was purely to keep the class interested and entertained.

With a day to go we felt prepared, until we did our practice run. It is very hard to keep a pace while speaking to a group. Maybe it was nerves but getting our presentation to stick to 10 minutes was extremely difficult. And again by making us stand up in front of everyone Barry forced us to know our stuff or face 10 minutes of hell.

Blog 7 The Bioprocess

The Bioprocess

At this stage in the semester we were pretty confident that we had found a product that was feasible and that we had enough information from the small scale fermentation and the research conducted that we could mould a fully functioning bioprocess. Having finally ironed out our differences of opinion, we met a new one. Again these glass jars were the pain in the back. To make a production of a beverage viable you either produce at high volume for reasonable selling price or produce less for a lower selling point. Producing less and having a generic product won’t work, as we have learned in the countless business modules, which have finally come to use. To use regular glass jars we would need nearly 100 to fill a 500L tank. That in my opinion was insane. Back to the internet we went and found that 10L jars can be bought, with a handle for easier manoeuvring. This at least reduced the amount of jars needed per process to 50, a much more manageable figure.

The bioprocess would begin in these jars with the kefir grains being fermented with the tested 5-10% sugar solution, then strained from the water and placed into new jars, the water would then be placed in the bioreactor where it could be treated with temperature and a final fruit syrup solution would be added for flavour and to fortify with Vitamins.

 

 

The final decided bioprocess is not the most efficient method by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a perfect fit for what we required to make the process viable and certainly allows a very broad scope for change if needed. One thing I have learned from working in industry and from our final year projects is that no process should be rigid, because if something goes wrong you need scope to be able to fix it. At the moment that process requires a lot of manual labour, which again from experience means more scope for human error, but I guess you don’t start on the top of the ladder.

At this stage it’s nearly half way through the module and I’m enjoying it, having to critically think about a process is different from just learning a generic process. From having to research so get a much wider and thorough view of what’s involved and how an industry works. One thing that has been eating at me though is my lack of computer skills and I feel that designing the website, or trying to get it to work is consuming an awful lot of time.

 

Blog 6 Up Scaling – The trouble begins

Up Scaling – The trouble begins

This is where problems really started to come to a head. With Aidan doing his Final Year Project on these Kefir grains he is the realistic expert in this area, and we are only researching this to a very basic level, his voice would travel furthest on decisions to be made. But on the other hand I feel I have the most relevant experience in working fermenting on a large scale and also working with volumes on a large scale. In articles that I have found the process has taken place in stainless steel bioreactors which can be used on a large scale, are significantly cheaper and very easy to clean, but Aidan has research and many more papers which show that only glass was used. This very quickly turned to a who’s right and a who’s wrong session. I was speaking from first-hand experience of using very small volumes to make up a big volume from the brewery and knew that is not a feasible way of making a product, while he was convinced that quality of the product would be effected if stainless steel was used. We decided to use a pros and cons list which would plainly lay out our thoughts and choose from that.

In the end we decided to use both. The fermentation would take place in large glass jars, while the rest of the process would take place in a stainless steel bioreactor, which could be equipped with all the ancillaries needed to bring the product to a stage where it was ready for bottling. The kefir grains would be filtered from the liquid before entering the bioreactor so that there would be no interaction with the stainless steel.  A happy compromise was reached.

We began work on a process that would suit this scale up and the parameters in place. I was happy to take a lead on this section, knowing I had worked in this area before. We designed a bioreactor that would suit our needs and could be supplied by all the ancillaries needed to produce the best product in the most efficient way. With all this in mind I decided to draw on CADworks the design that we all felt would suit us the best. Our final choice was a 500L tank that could be cooled, with accurate temperature control, and fitted with a impeller for consistent mixing.

Blog 5 Small Scale Fermentation – The Trial Run

Small Scale Fermentation – The Trial Run

In lectures we have moved onto something that I really do find interesting and I one of the main reasons I chose the module, the bioreactor. With an eye on a future job in the brewing industry I was curious as to how my experience of fermenting tanks and holding tanks compared with what was taught in lectures. The information was actually very useful and didn’t always conform to what I believed to be the “correct way” which was interesting.

We had made one final change to our product before small scale production started. It will now be a kefir water product, compared to a milk product. In the research that we were conducting on GI diseases it turned out that many people who suffer also suffer from Lactose intolerance. This would have made the product redundant to them.

So far small scale fermentation had been going to plan, in that Aidan had started it at home and the grains seemed to be thriving in a 5-10% sugar solution. We had found in the research that glass was the best material to carry out the fermentation because it won’t in any way react with the grains and it seemed to be working when placed in glass jars, so all was going to plan.

In our project, thankfully we hadn’t progressed our project far enough to include a bioreactor and this lecture came just in time to help us form an opinion and spark a few heated debates, the first of many. Because of our back ground in food science we obviously had a particular interest in the taste side of the product, but also the safety and viability of the product. This is where disagreement number one came about. I had an issue with the safety of a product that merely has just a teacloth stretched across it, considering that in lectures we had just covered the very obvious topic of contamination. But on the other hand it was argued that with the nature of kefir grains being microorganisms themselves that they would be immune to this contamination. It was decided that a much more advanced piece of material would be used as cover for the fermenting jars and that the liquid would be filtered at the end of the process.

 

Does it work? Can Kefir water be produced? Does it contain probiotics? Are the logistics feasible on a small scale, so they can be ramped up to large scale? What’s nee

Blog 4 How do we produce this Product?

How do we produce this Product?

In the lectures we have began to really dive into the bioprocess process and what is required for a successful fermentation and bioprocess. I feel like this level of information isn’t of much use to our group in terms of our product but it is the starting blocks of most industrial productions. The choosing of a cell line does relate to us as any old bacteria won’t be suitable for probiotic use, but inclusion bodies and their removal does not seem to affect us.

As mentioned before probiotics and vitamins will be the components of our functional food. Which after very little deliberation we have decided will be a beverage. In line with Actimel type products our beverage will be easily consumed in one sitting and will have all the necessary components suspended in it. After researching, in conjunction with Aidans project on functional foods, we discovered a hidden gem in probiotic deliverance. Kefir Grains.

Kefir grains are a group of Lactic Acid Bacteria that thrive in a matrix that gives the complexion of grain. In recent years there has been a jump in the interest and research into Kefir grains and they are known to promote a healthy digestive system.

That was about all we knew about it until Barry introduced us to Pub Med, the mecca of research papers. This really was the beginning of our product, were we now had concrete research to indicate that Kefir grains were a viable product. It was also a good source of information on how to make/grow the grains, as the only other information available was through “Do It Yourself” websites. Fortunately with this coinciding with Aidan thesis we had an expert at hand in the form of his supervisor who could advise him on the use of probiotics and even Kefir grains themselves.

 Our thoughts on the probiotic functional food were that through competitive exclusion, anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial properties that our beverage would prevent the onset of GI disorders and by lining the intestines cover any defects to keep the diseases in remission.

With Aidan choosing this to be the basis of his thesis it was a great opportunity to attempt the product on a small scale. It also made any problems which could arise in fermentation very obvious in a real time situation.