Effective management and control of the cold chain by application of Time Temperature Indicators (TTIs) in food packaging.

Journal of food and clinical nutrition recently launched an article related to the effective management and control of the cold chain by application of time temperature indicators in food packing by Fotis Stergiou, School of Science, Engineering and Technology, University of Abertay Dundee, United Kingdom.

Different temperature conditions cause unreliable printed shelf lives [best before dates] and food waste.  One of the most dominant aspects affecting the quality of chilled food is the storage temperature.  In short-living foodstuffs, such as dairy products, raw meat and fish, etc...

Nowadays, refrigeration is one of the most widely practiced method of preserving fresh foods and the improper use of this process can increase the potential risk that microbial hazards will advance and this in turn can lead to food poisoning.  As a result, temperature controls along cold food supply chains are crucial for maintaining food quality and ensuring the safety of food products.

There are many different ways that cold chain can be effectively managed and controlled. One of them, the Time Temperature Indicators [TTIs] has the benefit of being low cost and can be easily integrated in packaging.

Intelligent packaging can give a solution for maintaining the cold chain and it can be the main action point to control food waste. There are different types of intelligent packaging which can contribute to the management and control of the cold chain. The most common ones are biological [enzymatic and microbial], polymerized, diffusion based, electrochemical and photochemical.

As it can be concluded from the discussion above, during transportation food products are not maintained in a standard temperature and this can cause spoilage of the transported food. The cold chain participants play a key for consumers’ health, as they can maintain and control food’s microbial load in low levels by taking simple temperature measurements through the cold chain and by keeping accurate temperature records. Intelligent packages with applied TTI keep track of the temperature throughout the cold chain and seem to be the future of packaging. The easy use of TTI can cause less food waste while protecting consumer health more efficiently.

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Aaron Province

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Journal Food and Clinical Nutrition

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