The following is an independent report by the author to authorities of the European Commission. The goal of minimal processing and longer shelf life demands intense optimization and control of all the production and preservation parameters and often innovative techniques, to ensure safety and minimize food deterioration to the point of end use.
Quality assurance includes the post-processing phase and ideally extends to the consumer's table.
The ever more extensively adopted by the food industry quality management systems ISO 9001 and ISO 9002 explicitly require documented procedures for storage, handling and distribution. While previously the attitude was that, since deviations from the proper conditions are unavoidable, a percentage of mishandled products and the resulting loss in quality is acceptable and can be incorporated in the shelf life estimations, this cannot be tolerated today especially with perishable products, the safety of which can be dependent on the post process conditions. Certain stages of the chill chain are being recognized as important critical control points for new technology minimally processed chilled products such as MA packaged, cook and chill and other ready to eat chilled products. Effectively monitoring and controlling these CCP's is a very demanding task. Traditionally, one of the weaker links of inadequate control has been the post-processing phase.