Original title: The STARTEC Decision Support Tool for Better Tradeoffs between Food Safety, Quality, Nutrition, and Costs in Production of Advanced Ready-to-Eat Foods
The tool helps food companies assess how making a ready-to-eat food affects safety, quality, nutrition, and cost. Users start with a process chart and can simulate what happens at each step. An interactive database includes measures such as acidity, water activityA measure of how much water in a food is available for microbes to grow., ingredient and salary costs, and calculation models for Listeria, quality, and vitamin C. The tool shows results as curves or simple categories, then suggests corrective actions when needed.
Imagine making a meal for a group while keeping track of time, money, taste, and whether every ingredient is safe. A change to one ingredient or step can affect several of those things at once, and it is hard to judge the tradeoffs by looking at just one. In this paper, the meal-making steps are the production process, and the tool lets food makers check how choices affect safety, quality, nutrition, and cost, then offers a corrective action when a chosen limit is crossed.
Ready-to-eat food makers must weigh food safety against quality, nutrition, and production costs. This tool brings those factors into one place, so users can examine a process step and get a suggested corrective action when results cross limits they set.
The abstract describes a prototype tested and approved by end-users on selected ready-to-eat products, with pasta salad as the case product. It does not report numerical performance results or establish how well the tool works across all products, companies, or production settings.
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The STARTEC Decision Support Tool for Better Tradeoffs between Food Safety, Quality, Nutrition, and Costs in Production of Advanced Ready-to-Eat Foods — Taran Skjerdal, Andras Gefferth, Miroslav Spajic et al. — BioMed Research International — doi:10.1155/2017/6353510
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.