The Richardson Centre for Functional Foods and Nutraceuticals
The Richardson Centre for Functional Foods and Nutraceuticals (RCFFN) is a leader in functional food and nutraceutical research, supporting the development of an economically viable, functional food industry for both local and international markets.
RCFFN is located in a state-of-the-art, 55,000 square foot building, located at 196 Innovation Drive in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and is a research centre within the Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences, University of Manitoba.
Expertise, Equipment, Facilities and Research
RCFFN provides a variety of fee for services to the agricultural, ingredient processing, functional food and nutraceutical industries, including pilot plant services, primary and secondary processing, formulation, packaging services, analytical testing and human testing.
The RCFFN milling facility is a provincially licensed Food Handling Establishment containing excellent dry fractionation capabilities, including pilot-scale debranners, mills and an air-classification unit with a feed rate of 50 kilogram per hour. The analytical laboratory houses high-pressure liquid chromatography, mass spectrometry, ultra-high pressure liquid chromatography, gas chromatography and metal testing capabilities, among others.
The RCFFN kitchen has the equipment and capacity necessary to perform a variety of food development projects. Over the past five years, RCFFN Investigators completed over 28 clinical trials, enrolling over 1,200 participants investigating the benefit of functional foods and nutraceuticals in a variety of settings. These included cardiovascular, hypercholesterolemia, diabetes and obesity.
RCFFN can also assist industry clients to access funding by leveraging RCFFN researcher experience and relationships with funding agencies, such as the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Mitacs and the National Research Council.
RCFFN is active in knowledge transfer activities, recently organizing five conferences and workshops targeting both academic and industry audiences in areas related to nutrigenetics and nutrigenomics, plant sterols, food packaging, functional food ingredients and best practices for food-based clinical trials.
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