Innovative and Safe Seafood - Processing, Hygiene, Spectroscopy

The proportion of meals that are prepared outside of the home is increasing. Meeting the three consumer mega-trends convenience, health and sensory enjoyment, are vital for a products' success in the marketplace. For fish products, convenience is the lack ing area, and hence one that is in need of targeted research and development. The combination of convenience and sensory quality must be balanced by the fact that food safety currently is a key topic. One of the most common methods to achieve safe conveni ence foods with extended shelf life is by thermal processing. But, the quality of fish is severely reduced if the thermal process is designed for a chilled shelf life of more than 21 days. The concept Extended-Shelf-Life Packaging (ESL) will be examined s eafood products. ESL does generally, but not necessarily, imply processing under aseptic conditions to achieve sterile products. Treatment is performed to approach sterility and packaging conditions used are ultra clean. ESL processing will open for new c ategories of minimally processed chilled products. The technology also opens for combinations with modified atmosphere packaging that have been unavailable for thermally processed food thus far. To ensure safe and of high sensory quality ESL packaged sea food products after both processing and distribution/storage, it is of outmost importance to develop methods to verify the thermal load applied to the products, the initial bacterial load as well as other important quality aspects. Near Infrared (NIR) spe ctroscopy offers the possibility of measuring physical and chemical properties; it is a multi-analytical technique where several determinations can be made simultaneously. Thus, within the same measurements several parameters e.g. bacterial and thermal lo ad as well as content of important nutritional components may be verified. It is the aim of this program to develop rapid and reliable methods for verification of essential quality parameters of seafood products.