Baby food is going through a revolution in product choices and packaging.
The baby food of our youth was packed exclusively in glass with four distinct product categories-brown mush, green mush, orange mush and yellow-orange mush.
In recent years we've seen a shift of product offerings to products that more closely align with the current tastes of their parents-organic, grains like Quinoa, heirloom type vegetables and fruits. We've also seen a shift away from glass to flexible pouches with integral spigots through which to squeeze the purees-always a better word description than mush.
What is interesting is that the packaging and products are also the result of a processing change among the producers. Baby foods with the exception of fruits are sterilized by steam at temperatures at or above 250 Fahrenheit. This is done to safeguard the food from the growth and toxin production of a micro-organism called Clostridium botulinum, commonly called botulism. The organism is wide spread and commonly found in soil. its spores are very heat resistant and ensuring they are killed is the basis for "canned food." The organism, however, can only grow in what is commonly referred to by the FDA as "low acid" foods a confusing term which means that it doesn't grow and produce toxin in naturally acidic foods such as fruits or those to which acid is purposely added like olives, some peppers, salsas, etc. The new baby foods being marketed are acidified consisting of mixtures of grains and vegetables to which fruit and lemon juice are added to raise the acidity (lower the pH) below that which C. botulinum grows.
This also has implications for the process and package. Unlike the "low acid" foods which have to be processed at 250F and above for considerable time, the acidified foods can be processed at lower temperatures, 200F, for shorter times. This is good for color retention, flavor and nutrition retention-things babies may not care about but parents do.
The new pouches utilize what is known as a high temperature/short time process. The raw materials are mixed and pureed; it is then pumped through a heat exchanger-a narrow tube-where it is heated up to 200F, then filled into the pouch and the pouch further heated in a water bath to ensure its interior is sterile. Contrast this with filling the product in the glass container, loading it in an autoclave (a giant pressure cooker holding thousands of jars), bringing the whole load up to 250F, then cooling that mass of bottles down, and removing them from the autoclave and it's apparent, in the case of glass, you are heating a lot of package and some product which is inefficient.
The flexible package has a number of other advantages over glass-it is portable, light weight, resealable and squeezable. This makes it great for feeding in the car, on the go at daycare, etc.
What about plastics and the environment, you say? Although the pouch is multiple layers of plastics and foil and not recyclable like glass, this does not make it a clear cut loser. The package, even considering the raw materials, uses much less energy from fossil fuels in its manufacture than glass. The material components of glass, largely silica from sand, melts at 2000 degrees Fahrenheit and these furnaces are constantly at temperature, 365 days a year, powered by oil or gas boilers. Gas breaks which means it is packed in a case with dividers and the resultant case is heavier and larger than its pouch counterpart. This means that there are less glass containers in a truck which means more transport energy per unit of product.
Glass's fragility causes another problem in production. It runs on high speed production lines up to a 1000 jars per minute. When it breaks from impact, fragments can fly and fall into other jars-a potential disaster for a manufacturer.
The pouch comes at a premium, up to 10 cents per ounce more than glass but parents appear willing to pay for the choices and convenience.
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