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Mild Thermal Process Combined with Vanillin Plus Citral to Help Shorten the Inactivation Time for Listeria innocua in Orange Juice

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Abstract

The response of Listeria innocua (surrogate for Listeria monocytogenes) to combined treatments involving moderate temperatures (57 to 61 °C) and the addition of different levels of citral (0 to 75 ppm) was assessed to obtain a minimally processed orange juice. The presence of citral notoriously increased the bactericidal effect of mild heating treatment. This effect did not depend on the amount of added citral at all assayed temperatures. In a second stage, combinations of two natural antimicrobials (vanillin and citral) were assessed in order to find the most effective inactivation treatment in orange juice. Vanillin (900–1,100 ppm) and citral (25 ppm) combined with mild heating treatment (52 or 57 °C) were tested against L. innocua in orange juice. The addition of 900 ppm vanillin and 25 ppm citral halved or more the time required to achieve five logarithmic cycles of reduction at both temperatures with respect to thermal treatment without antimicrobial addition. The increase in the maximum growth rate calculated from the modified Gompertz model properly correlated with the increasing vanillin level for a given citral concentration. Complementary information was obtained from successfully fitting a Weibullian model to the nonlinear semilogarithmic survival curves: The addition of vanillin and citral significantly increased the bactericidal effect of mild thermal treatment, changing the distribution of inactivation times and obtaining narrower frequency shapes with lower variance and mode values. The combination of vanillin and citral with mild heating treatment resulted in an innovative alternative to minimize detrimental effects caused by thermal processing of fruit juices. In addition, a consumer panel evaluated them with an acceptable overall pleasantness.

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Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support from Universidad de Buenos Aires (X821 Project), CONICET (5473 Project), and ANPCyT (13955 Project) of the República Argentina. They also wish to thank ECA Agroindustrias for generously providing the orange juice.

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Correspondence to Sandra N. Guerrero.

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Sandra N. Guerrero and Stella M. Alzamora are members of the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas de la República Argentina.

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Char, C.D., Guerrero, S.N. & Alzamora, S.M. Mild Thermal Process Combined with Vanillin Plus Citral to Help Shorten the Inactivation Time for Listeria innocua in Orange Juice. Food Bioprocess Technol 3, 752–761 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11947-008-0155-x

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