Organic food quality: a framework for concept, definition and evaluation from the European perspective

Abstract

Consumers buy organic food because they believe in the high quality of the product. Furthermore, the EU legal regulatory framework for organic food and farming defines high quality of the products as an important goal of production. A major challenge is the need to define food quality concepts and methods for determination. A background is described which allows embedding of the quality definitions as well as evaluation methods into a conceptual framework connected to the vision and mission of organic agriculture and food production. Organic food quality is defined through specific aspects and criteria. For evaluation each criterion has to be described by indicators. The determination of indicators should be through parameters, where parameters are described by methods. Conversely, the conceptual framework is described according to underlying principles and starting definitions are given, but further work has do be done on the detailed scientific description of the indicators. Furthermore, parameters have to be defined for the evaluation of suitability of these indicators for organic food production.

Organic Agriculture 3.0 is innovation with research

“…Recently, experts from the international association Food, Quality & Health (FQH www.fqhresearch.org) have started to provide definitions for organic food (Kahl et al 2012a), organic food quality (Kahl et al 2012b), health (Huber et al 2011) and organic food processing and its impact on the food (Kahl et al 2014a, b). The FQH describes the food and production process (the production) as inseparable aspects which can be defined by criteria, indicators and measurable parameters (Kahl et al 2012 a, b).…”

Fructose Metabolism in Humans: What Isotopic Tracer Studies Tell Us

“…Even so, one goal of organic food production is high quality of the products [2] as well as maintenance of their "true nature" during the production process [2]. Kahl et al [10] identified health and sustainability as underlying goals in organic food production. Furthermore, they defined a combination of process and product aspects necessary for the definition of organic food quality.…”

“…Although consumers perceive these messages in both types of foods [8,9], they are associated differently. Furthermore, the conceptual background of functional and organic food is different with respect to quality concepts [10,11], which reflect the difference in the underlying paradigms of these two different food segments [12]. The aim of this paper is to analyze the similarities and differences of functional and organic food in order to determine if the concept of functional food supports or contradicts organic food production.…”

Quality assessment of baby food made of different pre-processed organic raw materials under industrial processing conditions

“…For quality evaluation we followed a multi-parameter approach (Kahl et al 2012), where several parameters were measured in parallel. In this study the effects of blanching and freezing compared to processing fresh or stored quality followed by sterilization and standardised processing of pureed baby food at industry level were compared and assessed.…”