Acceptable Yeast and Mold limits for Fruit Fillings
Good Day,
My company manufactures cooked fruit fillings for pies and pastries. I am looking for generally acceptable limits for yeast and mold on products for inclusion on specification sheets.
Thank you!
Hi tastemaker,
:welcome:
You will need to provide more information. How is the fruit filling packed and stored? What is the shelf life?
If you search yeast and molds on the website I'm sure that there will be many other related topics that may be of interest.
Kind regards,
Tony
Is this incoming or outgoing?
Hi tastemaker,
If the filling is cooked/pasteurized” then the level should obviously be initially low, eg <10 cfu/g
Subsequent changes / tolerances will depends on factors as noted in Tony's post / linked yoghurt thread.
I had a look around the net for generic micro. specs for “fruit fillings” without significant success.
In addition to yoghurt thread mentioned above you can get some ideas for other products (raw/RTE) from this oldish but still useful compilation –
micro. criteria for foods,1997.pdf 2.59MB 99 downloads
Thank you very much for the comments. They proved to be very helpful!
Have a great day!
A
Hi tastemaker,
I noticed this enticing research paper on varieties of Y&M in refrigerated, fruit filled pastries which may give some ideas about limits -
Fungi in Fruit-filled Pastries.pdf 968.12KB 37 downloads
i did wonder as to the fate of the unused portions.
Thank you for this - I've looked at this paper before. The experiment (as far as I can tell - I'm a layperson who's been trained in food safety, not a scientist) involves taking the fruit filling from various frozen pastries, blending the samples with water, and storing them at different temperatures, and then looking at mold growth in the filling, which took 7 to 25 days depending on the storage temperature. Then they looked at the types and quantity of molds that developed - which (I think) is between 393 colonies/plate and 65 g/plate (for samples stored at zero degrees C).
If I want to use this to justify our limits, would I say that if a pie stored at 0 degrees can develop 393 colonies/plate then our 100 cfu limit is . . . fine?