The TÜBİTAK MARMARA RESEARCH CENTER (MAM) aims to become a world leader in science and technology with research, development and innovation capabilities in the areas of Energy Technologies, Climate Change and Sustainability, Materials Technologies and Life Sciences. The Food Institute focus on ‘food processing technologies’, ‘food packaging and preservation’, nutrition and functional foods’ and ‘food safety and quality’.

The Seafood Pilot Processing line consists of sub-lines for fish cleaning, portioning and filleting (grader, conveyor, filleting table, angle flow table, trimming table, pin bone removing, spinning product flow table, fish skinner, pressing &lifting system, labelling machine); formed product production (mixer & mincer, drying centrifuge, forming machine, flour coating machine, battering machine, crumbing machine, frying machine); smoked and canned fish production (salting table & brine mixture tank, carrying trolleys, can seaming machine, smoke chamber, smoked salmon slicing machine, portion cutter); packaging and pasteurization equipment.

The advanced Food Safety Laboratory is equipped with analytical instruments such as GC-MS/MS, Q Exactive Orbitrap Mass Spectrometer; UPLCs with different detectors; ICP-MS for heavy metal and mineral analysis; Isotope ratio mass spectrometry (IRMS) (equipment for determination of natural and synthetic samples based on their isotope ratios); Simulator of the Human Intestinal Microbial Ecosystem (SHIME) – being purchased: It is a validated in vitro model, simulating the complexity of the gastrointestinal tract.

The equipment allows simulation of the full gastrointestinal tract from stomach to distal colon; All other basic instruments for safety and quality control of foods including fishery products. Additionally, it has batch processing equipment and laboratory instruments for official food analysis laboratories such as; extraction systems (classical, supercritical, ultrasound-assisted, microwave-assisted extraction), drying systems (freezedrying, spray drying, drum drying, tunnel drying), purification (chromatographic systems), encapsulation (fluidized bed drying, spray drying), characterization (chromatographs ftir, dsc, sem), LC-MS/MS, HPLC, GC, Spectrophotometer, microbiology laboratory, laboratory equipment for bioactivity analysis, rheological studies and texture analysis.

Services currently offered by the infrastructure: The services offered include the possibility of the development of new food products, functional foods, food formulations, pilot scale-up, development and/or application of new extraction and purification techniques, characterization, encapsulation, analytical tests, quality control, food safety studies, shelf life evaluation, in vitro studies on health effects of bio compounds, bioavailability, digestibility, sensory analysis, texture analysis, rheological analysis, utilization of food processing by-products including fish by-products, food packaging studies.