Development of effective heat treatments is crucial to achieve food products safety, and predictive microbiology is an excellenttool to design adequate processing conditions.This work focuses on the application of a modified Gompertz model to describe the inactivation behaviour under time-varyingtemperature conditions at the surface of a food product. Kinetic studies were carried out assuming two different heating regimes,typically used in surface pasteurisation treatments, and compared with isothermal conditions. Parameters were estimated on thebasis of generated pseudo-experimental data. It was concluded that the heating period greatly affects microbial inactivation andparameter estimation. If a slow heating treatment is used, the process time should be extended to achieve a given microbial loadwhen compared to a fast heating process. This is explained by the fact that, in the slow heating rate process the temperaturewas below the lowest temperature for inactivation for a much longer time, in comparison with the fast heating regime. 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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