Heat Penetration in Packaged Foods

This chapter is concerned with the measurement and interpretation of heat penetration curves, obtained from temperature measurements inside the food in the container or package. It is the most important part of determining an adequate process for sterilizing or pasteurizing food products. However, because of the complex nature of food products, the number of different packages and the variety of methods of processing them, the interpretation of the data is often difficult. All thermally processed packaged foods require a validated process schedule which is traceable to heat penetration measurements. The methods of doing this and the treatment of the experimental data are outlined in Section 5.2