Manufacturing safe and reliable foods is no easy task – especially in refrigerated, ready-to-eat meals, side dishes, dips and spreads. Often, these types of products undergo their final processing and packaging without a cook step, which omits the opportunity to significantly reduce the overall microbial load. Ultimately, these products are more sensitive to the contamination of unwanted microorganisms that can lead to human disease (as is the case with Listeria monocytogenes), or shorten the product’s shelf life (as is the case with common spoilage organisms, such as Leuconostoc, Pseudomonas and Zygosaccharomyces spp., for example).
In addition, some of these foods may not be suitable candidates for aseptic packaging or high-pressure pasteurization (HPP). This inherent lack of a “kill step” places added pressure on ensuring sufficient quality of raw materials, on formulation expertise and on the sanitary processing of these foods to ensure that such products meet the industry’s requirements for quality and food safety. While all of these are of equal importance, let’s focus on supplier verification and the qualification and handling of raw materials.