TT-born, US-based professor of food science and technology Melvin Pascall believes improved food packaging could help Trinidad and Tobago earn more foreign exchange.

Pascall said if a product was a lower quality in terms of taste and colour and was also advertised in a package that did not look as good, then its chances of capturing the market were lower.

He teaches at Ohio State University. His research interests are food packaging, antimicrobial packaging, food-contact surface sanitisation, food safety and food regulations. He is an expert in food packaging with an emphasis on integrity, modified atmospheric packaging, nanotechnology and plastics, edible packaging, packaging material sanitisation and food safety.

Pascall has received several awards and has written two books and 72 journal articles.

In 2020, he was selected as a Fellow of the US Institute of Food Technologists. In 2022, he and Dr Rafael Jimenez-Flores were the recipients of that year’s Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) Achievement Award.

He has also worked as a research scientist at the US Food and Drug Administration in Chicago.

Pascall spoke to Newsday before giving a lecture at the Mayaro/Rio Claro Regional Corporation about his work on December 19.

He made a promise to help any Caribbean nation requiring help and has worked with Jamaica and Guyana and is currently working with the UWI St Augustine campus.

His journey into food and packaging began in Rio Claro, where he was born and raised. He attended Rio Claro ASJA Primary School, then Rio Claro Government Secondary School and the Sixth Form Government Secondary School, St James.

In 1973, he began work at Carib Glassworks Ltd, Champs Fleurs, where he spent 15 years as a lab technician.

An e-mailed biography said he did a two-year course at the John Donaldson Technical Institute (University of TT) and earned a BSc in agricultural science, a masters in packaging science and a PhD in food science and environmental toxicology.

If Pascall had to do it all over again, he’d do the same thing, as he believes, “No matter what the situation is, whether it is war, famine, a question of plenty or drought, we all have to eat because we need to survive.”

At Ohio State he runs a lab, which examines the latest, growing questions and problems of food packaging.

But his deep delve into packaging began at Carib Glassworks. He was a shift worker and would look at the dimensions of the glass to ensure they conformed to the standards.

“I then went up to the chemical lab, where we looked at the testing of glass – chemical, microscopic analyses.”

The package was usually the most expensive part of most products, but a lot of people did not think of the cost of packaging, he added.

“There is a whole lot of psychology when it comes to packaging that the consumer was not thinking about,” Pascall said.

Label colours, shape and size were all carefully designed to attract the consumer, he said.

“You are not purchasing the product for the package, you are purchasing it for the produ