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The Animal Products Quality Unit QuaPA was created in 2005. It is attached to the TRANSFORM department and is located on the Theix site of INRAE Clermont-Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. It has a staff of 35 and regularly hosts about ten PhD and postdoctoral students.

The QuaPA unit is mainly working on meat products which consumption in the world is increasing. Meat chain has to face specific challenges (chemical safety, food security, environmental impact, and reliable information for consumer…). Our objective is to improve food nutritional quality and safety while maintaining the technological and sensorial properties. Certain societal challenges are also specifically studied as the evolutions due to global food transition, especially protein needs, the sustainability of production systems and the requirements of certain consumer populations as seniors ...

To meet these objectives, the QuaPA unit develops research programs in two directions:

(i) the rational design of meat products. This includes considerations of their acceptability and what becomes of them after ingestion. The rational design of high quality foods includes research work both on real products and on experimental systems which mimic the composition of foods. Mathematical models are also developed to better predict how the quality of foods is going to vary during processing.

(ii) improving the sustainability of food systems in a context of transition. In this case the research of QuaPA aims at insuring the chemical safety of the product all along the food chain, at enhancing value of by-products and at reducing the loss of animal proteins which require more inputs than plant proteins to be produced.

These researches are carried out by three disciplinary research teams: “Imaging and Transfers”, “MASS” and “BPM” supported by two technical platforms “AgroResonance” and the “Proteomics platform”.

Pierre-Sylvain Mirade, Unit Director