Shelf Life In-House Testing
My company produces fresh raw ground beef vacuum packed. We have a lab in-house and are looking to perform our shelf life testing in-house but looking for some direction on how others may perform these tests
-what types of plates do you use?
-what time frames do you use?
Any direction could be great!
Generally speaking what happens during shelf life testing is organoleptic AND plated sampling being done at regular intervals (1, 3, 5,7,8,9-depending on the desired shelf life declaration)
I would think you should be testing for
aerobic plate count
e coli plate count
y&m plate count
These would need to be repeated at intervals as suggested above
You may want to think about nutritional testing as well to see if there is any degradation in the composition over time
My company produces fresh raw ground beef vacuum packed. We have a lab in-house and are looking to perform our shelf life testing in-house but looking for some direction on how others may perform these tests
-what types of plates do you use?
-what time frames do you use?
Any direction could be great!
It should be minimally based on (a) the specification, (b) storage temperature, and (c) desired (or legislatory if applicable) shelf life. I hope you have these items and possess some micro. experience.
Not my Product area but IIRC, vacuum packing of NRTE meat does have some typical objectives regarding length of shelf life ?.
How is your inhouse lab separated from the rest of the building?
I'm not too keen on growing bacteria within a food manufacturing facility.
Only one company I ever worked for tested micro inhouse.
They stopped when the requirements for microbiological testing became a lot stricter.