Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Estimating The Efficacy Of Mild Heating Processes Taking Into Account Microbial Non-Linearities: A Case Study On The Thermisation Of A Food Simulant, Vasilis Valdramidis, Brijesh Tiwari, Patrick Cullen, Alain Kondjoyan, Jan Van Impe

Articles

Traditional and novel approaches for the calculation of the heat treatment efficiency are compared in this work. The Mild Heat value (MH-value), an alternative approach to the commonly used sterilisation, pasteurisation and cook value (F, P, C–value), is calculated to estimate the efficiency of a mild heat process. MH-value is the time needed to achieve a predefined microbial reduction at a reference temperature and a known thermal resistant constant, z, for log-linear or specific types of non log-linear microbial inactivation kinetics. An illustrative example is given in which microbial inactivation data of Listeria innocua CLIP 20-595 are used for estimating …