THE FOOD COLD CHAIN IN FRANCE AND ITS IMPACT ON FOOD SAFETY

摘要

In food safety, the respect of the cold chain is of prime importance. This paper presents the results of a survey on the French cold chain of chilled products sold in self service counters of super and hyper markets. Continuous temperature monitoring of 314 products all along the cold chain, from the end of production to the consumer, enabled us to create a database representing more than 3800 days of record and describing more than 2500 identified steps of the cold chain, among which 755 refrigerated transports, 113 warehouses, 344 display cabinets, 302 transports after shopping and 251 domestic refrigerators. Coupled with a simple integration model ιθ{sup}2dt and based on basic concepts of predictive microbiology, these results were used to evaluate the consumed time/temperature capital defined by the industrials as they establish the product shelf life. These results are of high importance as the current way to establish these shelf lives remains empirical today.