Hurdle Technologies: Combination Treatment for Food Stability, Safety and Quality

Since centuries foods have been preserved by heating, chilling, drying, salting, conserving, acidification, oxygen-removal, fermenting, adding various preservatives, etc., and often these methods were applied in combinations. More recently the underlying principles of these traditional methods have been defined (i.e., F, t, aw, pH, Eh, competitive flora, various preservatives), and effective limits of these factors for microbial growth, survival, and death were established. Food preservation and also food quality depends in most cases on the empirical and now more often on the deliberate and intelligent application of combined preservative factors, i.e. on so-called hurdle technology. It also became obvious that futuristic food preservation methods (e.g., high hydrostatic pressure, high-intensity pulsed electric fields, high-intensity pulsed light, oscillating magnetic fields as well as food irradiation) are most effective in combination with additional hurdles. Thus, hur… More >>

Hurdle Technologies: Combination Treatment for Food Stability, Safety and Quality