To foster fair and open food trade, regulatory harmonization between exporting and importing countries remains a key issue. Facing the expansion and diversification of the food trade, the Codex Alimentarius provides internationally recognized standards, guidelines and codes of practice related to food manufacture. Those guidelines have served the worldwide development of national and international guidelines/regulations integrating challenge tests as a requirement for various food items. For ready-to-eat and/or perishable food which supports microbial growth, various guidelines have been developed to facilitate the validation of preventive controls and product shelflife that is required by regulations, HACCP plans and food safety management systems, to ensure microbiological safety and quality for specified processing, storage and handling conditions. Thus food business operators and establishments responsible for the manufacture of a product need to demonstrate compliance with the food safety criteria throughout shelflife, which may include conducting challenge test studies combined or not with the use of predictive models to estimate the effectiveness of preservation conditions and the effects of modifying product composition or storage conditions on microbial growth behavior. In 2010, the U.S. National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods published guidelines for conducting challenge studies on pathogen inhibition and inactivation studies in a variety of Foods. Recently, an ISO TC34/SC9 working group was created to establish international standard on guidelines for conducting challenge tests and assess food shelflife with the recommendation to address both i) bacteria growth and ii) bacteria survival and inactivation.

During this session, lectures will address these issues and will cover questions such as what are the current guidelines and requirements worldwide? Why an international standard? How to comply with microbial quality indicators in the food industry when regulation mainly concerns pathogen? What are the needs and requirements for food industries and for regulatory stakeholders?

Presentations