## 3 Results and Discussion
### Cold Chain Management of HP Treated Meat Products  
Overall, HP treatment offers significant the shelf life extension of meat products as evidenced above (Table 5). Storage and distribution are the weakest links in the food management. The effective control of temperature conditions is important for the commercial viability of the products, since they often deviate from specifications. Using Cold Chain Database and Cold Chain Predictor software, a sequence of real cold chain stages could be used to build a representative t-T profile for meat products. This sequence consists of the production warehouse, transportation, distribution warehouse, transportation, supermarket, transportation by consumer to home, and consumer domestic refrigerator (Figure 7). The effective temperature (\(T_{\mathit{eff}}\)) (defined as the constant temperature that results in the same quality value as the variable temperature distribution over the same time period, based on the Arrhenius model and integrating in a single value the effect of the variable temperature profile) [37] estimated based on the records of contributed profiles is also presented in Figure 7, along with the worst case and the best case t-T profile scenario based on real data. Following the procedure described by [PERSON] et al. [24] and combining the representative profile (Figure 8) with the kinetic deterioration data presented above for sliced cooked products, assuming that the Lactic acid bacteria (LAB) are the dominant spoilage microorganisms, the remaining shelf life (SLR) of meat products may be estimated at any stage of the built representative profile. This profile was not applied to cooked ham cubes, since it is a product available only for food service and not for home consumption with a significantly short shelf life, while for Bratuvurst sausages, the profile is similar to the one of the sliced meat products, but significantly shorter (the whole duration is 15 days, compared to the 27 days profile of sliced meat products depicted in Figure 7). The results validate that HP treatment offers significantly in the reduction of spoiled meat products during storage and transportation and before storage in domestic refrigerators. For untreated sliced cooked ham, the prediction indicates that products are expected to have past their nominal shelf-life even before being stored in domestic refrigerators. Application of HP at 500 and 600 MPa significantly improves this prediction. More specifically, HP at 500 MPa will provide an SLR of 20 days and HP at 600 MPa an SLR of more than six months in consumers' refrigerators (Figure 8). Combining all the above data, the remaining shelf life, SLR, for sliced cooked ham and turkey may be estimated in the consumers' refrigerator considering a duration of the handling of the products for a total time of 19 days up to the point it starts being stored in the domestic refrigerator (Figure 7). Table 6 presents the SLR of cooked ham and turkey in slices during the storage in the consumer refrigerator if (a) the recommended storage conditions are applied throughout the whole cold chain (samples should be kept during storage and transportation at 2-4 \({}^{\circ}\)C, based on the producer recommendations), (b) the representative t-T profile of Figure 7 is applied for the cold chain stages before theconsumer refrigerator, (c) the best case scenario for the t-T profile is applied (Figure 7) before the consumer refrigerator, and (d) when the worst case scenario for the t-T profile is applied before storage at the domestic refrigerator (Figure 7). The results validate that proper temperature handling is necessary for untreated samples throughout the whole cold chain, while HP treatment results in longer duration of the products in consumers' refrigerators, allowing for unplanned temperature deviations from the recommended ones, thus minimizing the food waste (spoiled products before their consumption that would be discarded).