Innovative non thermal processing technologies to improve the quality and safety of ready-to-eat (RTE) meals.

Project acronym: HighQ RTE

HighQ RTE aims to improve the safety and quality of three representative categories of European ready-to-eat foods: ready-to-eat salads, fluid foods, and ready-to-eat vegetable based meals.

In particular, will be studied and set up process based on:

• Photosensitization (PHOTO)

• Pulsed Electric Fields technologies (PEF)

• High Pressure Homogenization (HPH)

• High Hydrostatic Pressure and packaging under CO₂ atmosphere (HHPCO)

For each technology, modelling of the death kinetics of the naturally occurring microbial population and deliberately inoculated pathogenic species and their evolution during storage will be performed in order to obtain deterministic and probabilistic models of bacterial survival and re-growth that will be the basis of quantitative risk assessment procedures.

The results of the risk assessment will allow the definition of the lethality levels required for the species of interest and of the treatment doses for the various processes as a function of the desired shelf-life and quality level.

HighQ RTE Basic data

Project Reference ID:  FP6-FOOD-023140
Budget: € 3.454.615 whereof 2.070.00 research funding is received from the European Community's Sixth Framework Programme.
Participants: 15 organisations from 6 European countries
Duration: October 2006 – September 2009
Coordinator: Prof. Elisabetta Guerzoni, Università di Bologna – Food Science Department  - UNIBO (Italy)