Stefano Renzetti



Stefano Renzetti

About him:

Stefano Renzetti brings fundamental science into consumer products and is the winner of the Harald Perten Prize 2018 . Dr. Stefano Renzetti (1975) is Senior Scientist at Wageningen Food & Biobased Research (WFBR), The Netherlands. He holds a MSc in Food Science and Technology from the University of Bologna (Italy) and a PhD in Cereal Science from University College Cork (Ireland). His doctoral thesis focused on enzymatic processing for the functionalization of gluten-free flours, with focus on protein modification. Stefano joined the Food Science group of TNO, the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research in 2009 and moved with this group to Wageningen Food and Biobased Research in January 2018.

His research activities focus on carbohydrates and proteins with applications related to topics of sugar and fat reduction, dietary fibre enrichment in bakery and confectionary products as well as in a more holistic approach towards food quality and nutrition design. Together with his Wageningen colleagues, Stefano works on integrating food science and technology with fundamental theories from polymers science and on translating them into practical food applications in a quantitative way. He has been investigated the factors controlling biopolymer phase transitions in complex food matrices and their influence of food structure and texture. His research activities have helped industry in the development of new products with improved nutritional composition, as for instance sweet bakery products with no added sugars and with a concomitant fibre enrichment. Although teaching is not among his official tasks, Stefano has supervised more than 15 MSc and PhD visiting students from various universities, which provided students an excellent occasion for verifying how fundamental knowledge and approaches constitute the backbone for industry-oriented problem solving.


His talk:

Harald Perten award-winning research: "Hydrogen bonding interactions as quantitative descriptors of food structuring mechanisms during cereal-based food processing"