ABSTRACT
Recent work carried out by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) into the state of health of the nation [1,2,3,4,8] has focused attention on the domestic handling of frozen and chilled foodstuffs. At present there is no Health and Safety legislation on the storage of domestic refrigerated foodstuffs, although it’s acknowledged that much government discussion has arisen on the subject particularly regarding storage temperatures. This has significant implications upon domestic fridge manufacturers who are reluctant to release
information on temperature distributions within their refrigerators. Results from experimental work and the MAFF survey indicate an average refrigerator temperature of 6° C with temperatures varying from -0.9° C to a potentially dangerous maximum of 11.4°C. At this maximum temperature cross contamination between foods is potentially dangerous.
