Making food delicious as well as nutritious is the dream of food producers and their customers alike. Brock University’s Validation Prototyping and Manufacturing Institute (VPMI) is aiming to make that dream a reality.

“It’s no longer good enough to just throw sugar into something to make it taste good,” says VPMI Business Director Ivano Labricciosa. “It’s all about changing the product’s compounds and properties so that it tastes better, lasts longer, is healthier for you and achieves all the other good things that companies are trying to do with foods.”

Labricciosa, who joined Brock at the end of January, is connecting with food and agriculture companies that are interested in partnering with VPMI.

“They’re looking for three major things we offer: our facilities and expertise for product testing and development, space for their association meetings, and how we carry out certification testing for their products,” Labricciosa says.

Particularly attractive to the sector is Brock’s expertise in biology and chemistry and its cutting-edge equipment designed to advance the food and agriculture sectors, he says.

These include the gas chromatograph-olfactometer-mass spectrometer that allows researchers to smell isolated compounds as they’re being developed.

Other machines in the VPMI’s chromatography spectrometry suite enable companies to develop the look and taste of products and to test how appealing these modified products will be to consumers.

Last month’s announcement of the Brock-led research farm also brings a host of opportunities in the field of sustainable agriculture, says Labricciosa.

Funded by a grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the farm supports multi-institutional research to produce certified virus-free grapevines for the grape and wine industry, develop farming methods — or precision agriculture — that use a range of technologies to grow crops more efficiently and explore how agriculture innovations can be applied in urban settings.

“Because the lab equipment we have installed is the most advanced of its kind, we are best suited with some of our equipment to help support research projects at Brock’s farm,” says Labricciosa.

This includes VPMI infrastructure such as the mass spectrometry suite, which supports “green chemistry,” and the state-of-the-art Zeiss suite of microscopes and scanner, he says.

Another agriculture project has allowed Assistant Professor of Chemistry Vaughn Mangal and Professor of Biology Liette Vasseur to collaborate with VPMI on research they are conducting to validate the effectiveness of EcoWool Canada’s wool pellets in enhancing soil quality.

“Access to this equipment has allowed us to bridge soil chemistry, carbon cycling and plant physiology towards developing more sustainable greenhouse practices,” says Mangal, who used the total carbon analyzer machine to see how much carbon and nutrients are retained and lost in soils containing the EcoWool pellets.

Mangal is one of several Brock University researchers working with Labricciosa.

“We are now reaching out and across various Faculties to other Brock researchers to expand the volume of work in addition to getting the word out to many more industries both local and abroad,” says Labricciosa, who adds that VPMI is also working with other universities.

Labricciosa joins Brock from Oshawa Power, where he was President and CEO. He holds a Master of Engineering degree from the University of Toronto and a Master of Business Administration from Queen’s University. His professional history in engineering, business development and strategic planning includes international experience in alternative and renewable energy.