AEM Accepts, published online ahead of print on 8 June 2007

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Appl. Environ. Microbiol. doi:10.1128/AEM.00245-07
Copyright (c) 2007, American Society for Microbiology and/or the Listed Authors/Institutions. All Rights Reserved.

A Probabilistic Modeling Approach for Evaluating the Compliance of RTE Foods with the New European Union Safety Criteria for Listeria monocytogenes

Konstantinos Koutsoumanis^* and Apostolos S. Angelidis

Laboratory of Food Microbiology and Hygiene, Department of Food Science and Technology, Faculty of Agriculture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, 54124; Laboratory of Milk Hygiene and Technology, Department of Food Hygiene and Technology, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, 54124

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: kkoutsou{at}agro.auth.gr.

Among the new microbiological criteria that have been incorporated in the EU Regulation 2073/2005 of particular interest are those concerning Listeria monocytogenes in ready-to eat (RTE) foods as, for certain food categories, they no longer require zero tolerance, but rather specify a maximum allowable concentration limit of 100 CFU/g or ml. This study presents a probabilistic modeling approach for evaluating the compliance of RTE sliced meat products with the new safety criteria for L. monocytogenes. The approach was based on the combined use of: a) growth/no growth boundary models, b) kinetic growth models, c) data on product characteristics (pH, a_w, shelf-life) collected from 160 meat products from the Hellenic retail market and d) storage temperature data recorded from 50 retail stores in Greece. This study has shown that the probabilistic analysis of the above components using Monte Carlo simulation, which takes into account the variability of factors affecting microbial growth, can lead to a realistic estimation of the behavior of L. monocytogenes throughout the food-supply chain and the quantitative output generated can be further used by food managers as a decision-making tool regarding the design or modification of a product's formulation or its "use-by-date" in order to ensure its compliance with the new safety criteria. The study also argues that compliance of RTE foods to the new safety criteria should not be considered as a parameter with a discrete and binary outcome because it depends on factors such as product characteristics, storage temperature, and initial contamination level that display considerable variability even among different packages of the same RTE product. Rather, compliance should be expressed and therefore regulated in a more probabilistic fashion.

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