Procedure Needed for Thawing Meat in Warehouse Conditions
We are looking for a procedure to thawing meat in our warehouse. The warehouse temperature is around 70 to 85 F.
Any help would be great.
Generally a tempering process for meat is done at the target temperature.
If your environment is 80F, then the surface of your meat is going to be 80F while the interior is still solid.
Thaw under refrigeration.
You need a temperature controlled area to defrost meat. Ideally you need something chilled but I'm fairly certain that some places have validated warmer temperatures (on a programme) which are then automated (and validated) so that the surface temperature doesn't exceed legal values. But that's like having an oven programme, you need a specific room with automated temperature control, built for purpose. It's been a long time since I worked in an industry like that.
But other considerations are things like:
Drip loss - are the meat packs sealed? I'm assuming raw here so lots of meat isn't necessarily vacuum sealed which can create blood loss on thawing making a mess and potentially destabilising the pallet. Think about how that will be dealt with and particularly the risk of pests (especially flies).
Air flow - any cooling or warming process helps if you have moving air so consider using fans if hygienic to do so but also how the centre of pallets will thaw. For crustaceans and also for offal we used to rack them out so they would thaw evenly and quickly for example.
Life once defrosted - as said above, the surface of a case or pallet will thaw first. You need to ensure you understand your life on defrost in worst case. If you thaw a pallet without breaking it down, you will have surface cases which will determine quite a short shelf life. It might take 48 hours or even more depending on your fridge to defrost that whole pallet.
you cannot thaw in those temperatures
cannot find usda regs but this should help
https://www.montana....hawingFood_.pdf