progetto Europeo HighQ RTE FP6-FOOD-023140 "Innovative non thermal processing technologies to improve the quality and safety of ready to eat(RTE) meals".

THE MAIN OBJECTIVE OF THIS PROJECT is to develop novel non-thermal technologies in order to improve the microbial safety and shelf life of ready-to-eat foods, while maintaining overall high eating and nutritional quality. Photosensitization (PHOTO), Pulsed Electric Fields technologies (PEF), High Pressure Homogenization (HPH) and High Hydrostatic Pressure under CO2 atmosphere (HHPCO) will be applied and further developed for food processing. Procedures based on PHOTO will be set up in order to drastically reduce the contamination level of naturally occurring and inoculated pathogenic species in vegetable raw materials and packaging for the development of ready-to-eat vegetable and fruit salads. The potential of PEF and semi-continuous HPH will be compared both in terms of pathogenic species inactivation, microbiological quality and changes of the properties of food proteins as well as microstructure and rheology for the development of innovative fluid foods. The ability of the latter technology to activate naturally occurring or exogenous enzymes will be exploited in order to generate new bioactive natural food components. HHPCO will be applied to ready-to-eat meals (of vegetable origin) in comparison and in addition to traditional mild heat processes. The optimisation of the formulation of the fluid or solid food systems to be subjected to the various technologies will be performed taking into consideration nutritional aspects (salt, lipid contents), the possible chemical, physicochemical, microstructural and functional changes induced by the processes (PHOTO, PEF, HPH, HHPCO) in terms of physical state and rheology (appropriate viscosity, particles presence and size etc). 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. For the various combinations product-process also the meal formulation optimisation will be performed in relation to chemical, nutritional, microstructural and functional changes induced by the exposure to the various processes.