Preface: development in food industry: innovative functional food and food technology strategies

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Application of nanotechnology in the agro-food sector

Nanotechnology is an emerging field of research that has been widely applied in different scientific and engineering areas. The agro-food sector is not an exception, which considers its applicability in several areas of major interest for both consumers and producers. This review considers major concepts related to nanostructures and nano-based instruments used in the food sector, as well as their applications in agro-food products. Food safety through the use of nanosensors for pathogen detection, smart packaging, and valorisation of food products by nanoencapsulation/nanodelivery of food ingredients (e.g. flavours) are examples of important areas of nanotechnology. Consumers' apprehension regarding food stability and safety issues is also considered.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Margarine products quality monitoring using reflectance UV-VIS-SWNIR spectroscopy

Margarine is a term that can indicate any of a wide range of butter substitutes. Due to the great diversity of the raw material, margarine end-product quality characteristics are expected to be highly diversified. This article proposes the use of reflectance UV-VIS-SWNIR spectroscopy to monitor the margarine end-product quality properties. The main effort in this work was the development of a fast monitoring procedure to assess the quality of the manufactured margarines. 
The study was performed on two margarine products: regular margarine (less than 80% fat) and reduced-fat margarine (less than 60% fat). The nine product samples were collected during the production line normal operating conditions on different days. The samples had the surface cleaned in order to remove any sign of oxidized material. Then, spectra were collected by a reflectance probe normal to the sample surface. The samples temperature was recorded (10.0± 2.0ºC) and the probe-sample distance was kept constant for all the samples. The integration time was set to 40s for the collection of the five UV/VIS spectra per samples; the three VIS/NIR spectra per sample were collected using a 10s integration time.
The data analysis was performed on each product and for each spectral range independently. The spectra were normalized by its maximum intensity and the corrected for using a robust multiplicative scatter correction algorithm. A principal component analysis was performed to the pre-process spectra and the multivariate statistical process control limits were determined with bootstrap for each product/spectral range.
Results show that UV-VIS-SWNIR reflectance spectroscopy provides a quick and fast assessment of these products characteristics and thus it can be used as an indication of the overall product variability

Stack Overflow in Github: Any Snippets There?

When programmers look for how to achieve certain programming tasks, Stack Overflow is a popular destination in search engine results. Over the years, Stack Overflow has accumulated an impressive knowledge base of snippets of code that are amply documented. We are interested in studying how programmers use these snippets of code in their projects. Can we find Stack Overflow snippets in real projects? When snippets are used, is this copy literal or does it suffer adaptations? And are these adaptations specializations required by the idiosyncrasies of the target artifact, or are they motivated by specific requirements of the programmer? The large-scale study presented on this paper analyzes 909k non-fork Python projects hosted on Github, which contain 290M function definitions, and 1.9M Python snippets captured in Stack Overflow. Results are presented as quantitative analysis of block-level code cloning intra and inter Stack Overflow and GitHub, and as an analysis of programming behaviors through the qualitative analysis of our findings.Comment: 14th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, 11 page

Compal Família : changing consumption behavior in the juice and nectars category

Sumol+Compal is a beverage Portuguese company, responsible for 25% of the non-alcoholic segment, present in the market for more than 50 years. It resulted from the merger of two of the strongest player on the soft drinks market: Sumolis and Compal. The company is present on the J&N category with the brand Compal, a premium leader brand that offers high quality juices, made from real fruit. On 2012, on the Portuguese recession apogee, the brand launch on the market Compal Família, a more diluted product, proper for new ways of consumption. With the increase of private labels power and the changing on consumers’ private consumption, Compal decided to expand its total market demand by addressing a different consumption occasion: main meals. After two years of Compal Família launch, Rodrigo Costa, the brand marketing manager and his team, realized that consumers haven’t perceived the new product positioning properly, especially because juices were not adequate for main meals. A new challenge emerged and for 2015, the team had to establish a new strategic plan for Compal Família. After several analysis, they knew that the only options available to reach their objectives would passed by repositioning the product, investing on packaging proper for family consumption or reducing its value to a product line extension.Sumol+Compal é uma empresa portuguesa de bebidas, responsável por 25% do mercado de bebidas não alcoolicas em Portugal, com experiência no mercado há mais de 50 anos. A empresa resultou da fusão de dois fortes concorrentes no mercado de bebidas: Sumolis e Compal. S+C está presente no mercado de sumos e néctares com a marca Compal, uma marca de estatuto premium que lidera a categoria, graças à qualidade dos seus produtos, resultado de uma produção natural à base de fruta. Em 2012, no apogeu da crise económica portuguesa, a marca lançou o Compal Família, um néctar mais diluído aproriado para novas formas de consumo. Com o aumento de poder das marcas brancas, em conjunto com a diminuição do consumo privado, a marca Compal decidiu tentar expandir a procura através de novas formas de consumo às refeições principais. Passado dois anos do lançamento de Compal Família, Rodrigo Costa, o responsável de marketing da marca e a sua equipa, verificaram que o posicionamento do produto não tinha sido percepcionado pelos consumidores correctamente, principalmente devido à forma de consumo proposta para os sumos. Assim, um novo desafio surgiu e para 2015, a equipa ficou responsável por estabelecer uma nova estratégia para o Compal Família. Tendo por base alguns estudos de mercado e com um objectivo em mente, as únicas hipoteses passam por reposicionar o producto, investindo numa alteração de embalagem apropriada para consumo familiar ou através da comunicação do producto como mais uma sub-marca de Compal

How purchase type influences customers´ engagement on brands´ social media platforms

Our society is currently suffering an urge of keep purchasing new products with hedonic characteristics, which will make us feel happier and more fulfilled. Nowadays, there are almost no customers’ decisions that are unaffected by social media, which leads to the increased importance for brands of generating customer engagement via their social media platforms. Thus, it’s crucial to understand if different types of brands generate different levels of engagement. In order to fill this gap on the literature, this dissertation investigated whether, on the hedonic brands category, purchase type – material vs. experiential – influences the level of customers’ engagement on the brands’ social media networks. Furthermore, it was perceived how price and gender affect this relationship. To this end, an online survey with 178 respondents was conducted to identify some patterns of behavior on this subject. Based on questionnaire results, although experiential products tend to create more user generated content, when it comes to Customer Brand Engagement (CBE) on brands’ own social media platforms, material brands take the big win. Moreover, it was accepted a positive relation between the price of the purchase and CBE on brands’ social media. Nonetheless, price does not have any moderation effect on the relation between the brand type and CBE. Additionally, it was recognized stronger levels of CBE by females than by males, yet gender also does not moderate the relation between both variables.A nossa sociedade está atualmente a sofrer de uma urgência contínua da compra de novos produtos com características hedônicas, que nos fazem sentir mais felizes e realizados. Hoje em dia, quase todas as decisões tomadas pelos consumidores são afetadas pelas redes sociais, isto leva à crescente importância para as marcas em gerar envolvimento com o consumidor através das suas plataformas online. Desta forma, é importante perceber se diferentes tipos de marcas geram diferentes níveis de envolvimento. De maneira a preencher esta lacuna na literatura, esta dissertação investiga se, em marcas de categoria hedônica, o tipo de compra – material vs experiencial – influencia o nível de envolvimento dos consumidores com as redes sociais das marcas. Além disso, foi testado como é que o preço e o gênero afetam essa mesma relação. Para esse fim, foi realizado um questionário online com 178 participantes de forma a identificar alguns padrões de comportamento. Com base nos resultados do questionário, embora os produtos experienciais tendam a criar mais conteúdo gerado pelo usuário, quando se trata de CBE (customer brand engagement) nas próprias plataformas, as marcas materiais saem vitoriosas. Além disso, foi aceite uma relação positiva entre o preço da compra e o envolvimento do consumidor nas redes sociais da marca. No entanto, o preço não tem nenhum efeito de moderação na relação entre o tipo de marca e CBE. Foi também confirmado níveis mais elevados de CBE por mulheres do que por homens, porém o gênero também não modera a relação entre as duas variáveis