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To develop improved processing technologies for cucumbers, peppers, cabbage, and sweet potatoes that will benefit growers and processors in North Carolina. Specific areas of interest will be: (1) application of developing processing technologies to develop functional ingredient forms from vegetables and ensure safe preservation of high quality vegetable products, and (2) modeling of the growth of bacteria and bacteriophage in fermentation processes.
We will utilize commercial cultivars of these vegetables which are currently grown in North Carolina and materials from breeding and evaluation programs at NCSU. Development of processing technologies for vegetables will be carried out using mechanistic modeling approaches to identify key process variables, along with laboratory- and pilot-scale processing trials. Appropriate physical and chemical evaluations of the processed vegetables will be done. When it is feasible, commercial trials of new technologies will be done in cooperation with North Carolina processors.