title: Establishment of provisional quality assurance guidelines for assessing the hygienic adequacy of beef side cooling regimes.
abstract: The hygienic adequacy of beef side cooling regimes can be assessed from temperature histories obtained for a site within the aitch-bone pocket. Each temperature history is used to generate a numerical value, the Process Hygiene Index (PHI), which reflects the amount of mesophilic pathogen growth that the cooling regime allows. The PHI concept is proposed as a quality assurance tool for assessing beef side cooling. To develop provisional PHI guidelines for acceptable cooling, a chilling regime for carcasses which would yield frozen, boxed products was monitored on each of 11 days. Although the regime was hygienically acceptable, it was marginal in that cooling some sides to 7 °C took almost the permitted maximum time of 48 hr. The guidelines, derived from that process, based on a conventional three-class sampling plan, where the maximum acceptable value (M) is the highest PHI value obtained and the target value (m) is the 80th percentile PHI value of the pooled data from all acceptable, monitored trials. The proportion (c) of sample values that may lie between (m) and (M) was determined from the batch that had the highest PHI values. The proposed guidelines for the hygienically acceptable cooling of beef sides destined for fabrication to frozen product are: M = 19; m = 14; and c = 60 %, with no fewer than five samples being tested per batch (n ≥ 5). For sides destined for chilled products, a processor may wish to use more stringent, in-house guidelines, to assure an extended product storage life.
authors: Meat Industry Research Institute of New Zealand, P.O. Box 617, Hamilton, New Zealand.
authors: R J
authors: RJ
authors: Jones