Food safety is an essential element of food production, and as such, it is important to anticipate safety issues when new products, processes, ingredients and recipes are being considered. This is a fundamental requirement of the design phase, involving predictive modelling, risk assessment, microbiological thermal kinetics evaluation and implementation of HACCP. Accompanying this, the business case is supported by regulatory, consumer concept and market research.
Food safety and shelf life stability predictions require an understanding of the fundamental science to take into account the interactions between ingredients and processes. This includes the assessment of microbial barriers, such as salt and sugar reduction, the use of natural and artificial preservatives, challenge and shelf life testing and product microstructure analysis during product development. This can also involve shelf life benchmarking, validation of cleaning procedures, CIMSCEE calculations and spoilage predictions.
Scaling up from a new product design kitchen to commercial production often introduces a whole new set of food safety challenges from hygienic processing to packaging solutions. It is very difficult to assess with any confidence the part that increasing sample size, throughput and equipment design will play, especially when trying to model conditions using a small scale benchtop laboratory set-up.
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