In these recent years, there has been an increasing demand by consumers for healthier and fresh-like food products.  High Pressure Processing (HPP) is a nonthermal technology for inactivation of vegetative microorganisms, which enables food preservation with limited effects on the organoleptic and nutritional quality. Although commercial implementation of HPP for food preservation has been fast growing since the late 1990’s, ensuring the food safety of minimally-processed products is still challenging, since both vegetative and sporeforming pathogenic bacteria have to be inactivated or inhibited until the end of the shelf-life.

This symposium will explore recent advances in the use of predictive modelling and challenge-testing in HPP process validation. The first presentation will be focused on the impact of high pressure on pathogen inactivation and the influence of product characteristics. The High Pressure Process Predictor (HP³), a user-friendly simulator, will be presented. In addition, the contribution will, also, deal with the behaviour of surviving cells during the subsequent storage of pressurised meat products. The second topic will highlight an innovative initiative combining HPP and biopreservation to enable inactivation of sporeformers in a meat product. In this study, three lactic acid bacteria were first selected regarding their innocuousness, inhibition against sporeformers, and susceptibility to antibiotics. Once selected, their inactivation and growth following HPP was determined. The last presentation will give an overview of the commercial developments of HPP, worldwide, with a special focus on the current, main interests of HPP for meat product preservation. One of the main interests resides in the reduction or removal of chemical preservatives, while maintaining commercial shelf-life without compromising food safety.

Presentations