Thermal Process Deviations
Thermal Process Review
All factories cooking, pasteurising or sterilising foods using heat will occasionally have situations where the process is not applied properly. Often these deviations result from unavoidable events like thunderstorms affecting the electricity supply or boiler/machinery breakdown.
What marks out the best factories is not that they don’t have process deviations but the efficiency with which they deal with them.
A regime can be designed to anticipate likely deviations and then an experimental program put in place to ensure data is available to aid safe and efficient decision making on product release or disposal.
Tools for dealing with process deviations: Simple cooker time-temperature deviations can often be dealt with by heat transfer modelling if good data is available on which to base the predictions. This can be quick and cost effective.
Sometimes heat transfer modelling is not appropriate, such as when a recipe has been prepared incorrectly. Under these circumstances, if the product is economically worth saving, then temperature measurement trials under the abnormal conditions may be worth considering.