Modelling for food safety in simulated cheeses
Special Symposium - Innovations in Food Technology (LMC Congress)
Hygiene, Hygienic Design & Unit Operations (Food-5a)
Keywords: food safety, cheese
In addition to effective measurement techniques, predictive microbiology tools are required to assure the quality and microbiological safety in food production. These tools allow to predict the environmental conditions favouring microbial contamination and the pathogens development in foods.
Cheese properties are favourable enough to support the microbial colonization of several pathogens, such as Listeria monocytogenes, so it is a target product in the field of food safety. With the aim of controlling the undesirable episodes of contamination associated with this food, it would be advisable to develop complete models that allow to select the safest operational conditions. In this work, mass balances for involved solutes have been set out, obtaining a system of differential equations that includes diffusion and reaction processes and allows the modelling of structured foods.
Prediction of microbial evolution throughout the food structure requires not only suitable models, but also good available data of food features, and kinetic and diffusional parameters. Cheese is a heterogeneous food with uncontrolled characteristics, which makes difficult to study the independent influence of several parameters and to collect representative data. For this reason, model foods simulating cheeses with different compositions have been designed to study their effect on Listeria development. Finally, model predictions were compared with experimental results.
See the full pdf manuscript of the abstract.
Presented Wednesday 5, 11:45 to 12:00, in session Hygiene, Hygienic Design & Unit Operations (Food-5a) Continued.
