Shelf ideas are a huge hit among those people who are lazy.  Most of the people who are busy with their professional lives tend to quest for the shelf ideas in order to save time.  Till date, we have come across the tips that could increase the shelf life of food products. Recently the Mumbai University’s Physics professor named Vaishali Bambole has come up with a top-shelf idea.  She along with her team of professors and scientists discovered a technology to keep the popular tiffin items idli and white dhokla for three long years without using any preservatives.

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The technique that is being used to preserve the food not only increases the shelf life of the food but also keeps the softness, taste and nutritional value of the food.  The discovery is much-appreciated by the food lovers and for the armed forces for whom the packaging is done. This healthy kind of preservation is pretty good when it comes it distributing foods to needy people at the time of natural calamities.  The food packets that gets distributed at the time of disasters last only for 90 days. But with this new preservation technique, the scientists are going to preserve the food for up to 3 years, which is quite a great achievement.

Without the use of preservatives, the food is going to be preserved now

Dr Vaishali Bambole, 48, designed a concept and turned it into a reality, which is now winning accolades.  She is currently busy with the process of patenting innovation. Talking about her innovation, Dr Vaishali Bambole, says her department has discovered a technology to preserve Indian cuisines like idli, upma & white dhokla for 3 years without adding any preservatives or impacting its taste and nutritional value.

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She further said, “I’ve been working on this since 2013. This is an electron beam radiation technique. We’ve used this technology for the 1st time on cooked food. It can be used in packaging food for armed forces, astronauts as well as for mass distribution in case of natural calamity.”

She also added, “We selected food items that contain less amount of oil & protein. Yesterday we opened idli after 3.5 years & that was still fresh. We experimented on several food items but got the best results in these 3 food items.”

She said that she worked on this extensively from the last 15 years.  The food will be chemically polymerized that will ultimately increase the shelf-life of it.  As the experiment is successful the next step is to start commercializing it. 

Published by Sujatha Reddy on 09 Feb 2019