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The continuous health consciousness and enthusiastic information on effectiveness of diverse diet and their direct relationship with health, the demand of nutritious food is increasing day by day. The concept of whole and functional food includes the beneficial effect on host health and reduces the risk of chronic diseases beyond fulfilling basic nutrition. The traditional prevalence of rice gruel (Marr) before the implementation of steam cooking of rice has been noticed. Even today the rice gruel is provided to the children with tea-spoon full of ghee and pinch of salt and spices for maintaining health, mostly practiced in remote villages. Various types of societal reforms and development led the people to depend on the processed foods. The compromise optimum point was obtained for sensory scores using Response surface method RSM) to optimize the soup recipe and evaluated for the responses and found the maximum deviation of 5% from theoretical values and remained highly acceptable. Hence, the identified combination rice flour, moringa leaf powder and developed blended oil in the ratio of 5.537 : 0.890 : 0.526 were used as optimized combination of functional instant vegetable soup.

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Dr Prasad is a faculty of Food Engineering and Technology. His research interest includes non destructive testing, image analysis, nano technology, engineering properties of foods and various related aspects of food processing. He has more than 100 research contributions as papers, book chapters and books.Mr Singh is a dedicated research scholar.

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