Quality, Storage and Processing of Plant Products (QSP) is a university course taught at the Faculty of Tropical AgriScience in the first block of the winter semester. The lectures cover plant commodities that are processed into food and food industry ingredients such as sugar, flour, vegetable oil, and beverages (hot non-alcoholic and alcoholic fermented and distilled), with emphasis on harvesting, processing, storage and quality parameters of plant products. During the seminars, students have the opportunity to visit facilities where plant commodities are transformed into food:
The Sugar Factory in Dobrovice is the largest, oldest and most modern plant of its kind in the Czech Republic. It was founded in 1831 and has operated every season since then, which is unique in Europe. The Dobrovice facility operates in line with the principles of circular economy, processing sugar beet without waste. The main products are table sugar (crystalline sucrose), alcohols, feed, fertiliser, soil, water and energy. Students in the QSP course went through the entire sugar production process from raw material intake, laboratory inspection, and sugar extraction to processing the sweet juice into crystalline sucrose.
The Perner mill in Svijany is the most modern mill in the Czech Republic, it produces approximately 14% of all flour produced in the country and uses the state-of-the-art technologies supplied by the company Bühler. The Perner mill produces flour for large customers/processors, but also retail packs (1 kg) of wheat flour (plain, semi-coarse, coarse), wholemeal, rye, buckwheat, rice and spelt flour; as well as fibre, feed flour and bran for human nutrition and the animal feed industry. Students of the QSP course experienced the entire flour production process, from raw material intake, laboratory testing, and grain cleaning to milling into flour.
Beer production (as well as hop cultivation) has a long tradition in the Czech Republic and is a billion-business. Czech technologists and brewers have been involved in the creation of breweries in many tropical countries. Students of the QSP course had the opportunity to see the technology of beer production in the Suchdolský Jeník microbrewery at the Faculty of Engineering of the CZU.
