ABSTRACT

Food preservation is designed to enhance or protect food safety while maintaining the organoleptic attributes of food. Inactivating or inhibiting the growth of undesirable microorganisms is very important for the successful and acceptable preservation of food. The thermal inactivation data cannot be accounted for by experimental artifacts, and there is no satisfactory, unifying explanation for variability in thermal death kinetics. The higher the initial microbial population in a food, the longer is the processing/ heating time at a given temperature required to achieve a specific lethality of microorganisms. While thermal processing guidelines are generally adequate for destruction of pathogens in foods, there may be conditions when microorganism could become more heat resistant. The use of heat for the inactivation of microorganisms is the most common process in use in food preservation. Heat treatment designed to achieve a specific lethality for foodborne pathogens is one of the fundamentally important strategies used to assure the microbiological safety of thermally processed foods.