Chilled Foods, a Comprehensive Guide.

One of the most interesting developments in recent times has been the introduction of chilled foods. Convenience, ease or lack or preparation and 'fresh and healthy' image are some of their attractive features.

With chilled foods, care is required at every stage in the food chain, which puts considerable emphasis on checking various attributes throughout the chain from raw material to consumer use. This text provides a guide to the many aspects that must be covered to ensure the consumer is provided with safe, quality products. This type of product was first seen in the late 1960s and since then developments have taken place in the area of refrigeration and in temperature monitoring.

All this has meant that in the last decade chilled foods have come to represent a larger proportion of the weekly food purchases in the UK. Their safety has resulted from the careful application of scientific principles and depends on a series of factors. The over-riding requirement is to control temperature at every stage of the total 'process', be it in the factory or in the distribution chain. Great emphasis must be placed on hygiene in the actual preparation, and this in turn has led to a greater understanding and awareness of the hygienic design of equipment, even the buildings, and the introduction of more appropriate sanitation regimes. Alongside all this, developments in the methods of detecting micro-organisms have enabled a more secure way of checking the microbiological status of the products. Hence the importance of the application of HACCP procedures.

Some 17 contributors have created this book and the chapters they have written are entitled: Trends in consumer tastes and preferences; Marketplace product knowledge - from the consumer viewpoint; Legislation; Refrigeration of chilled foods; Temperature monitoring and measurement; Processing; Chilled food packaging; Chilled foods microbiology; Conventional and rapid analytical microbiology; The beneficial role of micro-organisms in the safety and stability of refrigerated foods; Non microbial factors affecting quality and safety; Shelf-life determination and challenge testing; Quality and consumer acceptability; Cleaning and disinfection; Hygienic design considerations for chilled food plants; and Total quality management.

One way and another the reader gets to understand the whole story about the production of chilled foods.