Food Irradiation Future Still Bright

摘要

In late spring and early summer of 2000, irradiation of food made national headlines in major newspapers. Electron-beam-irradiated beef patties were introduced to the marketplace by Huisken Meats to ensure that no viable Escherichia coli would exist in the products. Hawaii Pride used irradiation to rid papaya of pests before shipment to the mainland. In 2003, about 20 million lb of ground beef and papaya were treated by irradiation. The market for both of these products was growing at about 30-40% a year. SureBeam Corp., created in 1999 as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Titan Corp., built electron-beam food irradiation facili-ties in Iowa and Hawaii and in March 2001 became a public company traded on NASDAQ. It proceeded to build food irra-diation facilities in Brazil, Illinois, Texas, Cali-fornia, and Viet Nam. SureBeam owned most of the facilities completely, but in a couple of the facilities had only part ownership.