Smart tools for flexible wheat use – EVAGRAIN

Cereal grains are the most important renewable resource for human food and animal feed. About 55% of the 35 MT French wheat production is exported each year making France a major actor on the international market. However, French wheat has to face the production of other wheat growing countries whose agronomical practices favour low production prices and/or high protein content of grains, one of the main quality criteria of wheat.
EVAGRAIN focuses on the technological facet of the wheat quality defined as the ability to meet expectations for a given end-use. Measuring the technological quality is crucial for determining the market price, but besides the protein content, very few other criteria are actually used. Yet, wheat quality is complex, especially as agricultural trends change: i) climate change imposes increasing abiotic constraints on crops and ii) new sustainable agricultural practices arise from the market and societal demands. As a result the harvest quality and quantity get more heterogeneous which has significant adverse consequences on the agri-food chain, from storage to bakery product quality. Clearly a more robust and versatile evaluation system of grain quality is needed to answer the quality demand for a large range of uses, to anticipate more severe quality variations consecutive to global warming and to compete on the international market.

The ambition of EVAGRAIN is to design a Decision Support System (DSS) which can integrate knowledge about wheat quality and deliver plausible interpretations of quality tests results: i) for various end-uses in industry and ii) based on analytical data. A second objective is to explore innovative analytical quality tests. Finally, a third objective is to support knowledge transfer from cereal science and technology to economic actors of the cereal sector.

To reach these objectives the DSS will involve model-based assessment systems allowing comprehensive accounts of the dependences between the behavioural properties (protein aggregation capacity, dough visco-elasticity…) and the quality criteria (dough stickiness, bread loaf volume, biscuit colour…). The final DSS will integrate knowledge and data about grain and cereal products from different sources as database, literature, existing models, experts…Especially, research in cereal science has shown that beyond the content and nature of the proteins other grain components, such as lipids and pentosans, but also water status can deeply influence the technological behaviour of grains and the cereal product quality. The project will investigate these compounds allowing to establish possible relationships with protein behaviours and grain quality. This new knowledge will be integrated to the DSS to improve its performances. The final system will be implemented as a web-tool, usable by any actor of the cereal sector eager to assess the quality of wheat grain with three major outputs:

-The prediction of the quality of wheat with respect to end-use.
- An explicit account of the reasoning underlying the prediction of quality
- An assessment of the uncertainty of the outcomes.

EVAGRAIN is an interdisciplinary project that combines modelling approaches, experimental research and technological developments. A strong expertise on wheat quality is gathered from the institutional and industrial partners of the project, which will be reinforced by a scientific and technical advisory committee selected from VegepolysValley stakeholders. The food industry is facing a growing need for process optimization based on detailed resource characterization. This project will pave the way for the development of new standards to qualify wheat grain by promoting new assessment practices. EVAGRAIN's operational development will be limited to bread-making and biscuits, for which there are more data from the literature and the expertise of EVAGRAIN's partners.