Chill Counter Products 2

The quality of sausages can be stabilized by packing the foodstuff under modified atmosphere with low oxygen contents. Sausages packed in transparent packaging materials are sensitive to light-induced photooxidation processes. Following greying of the sausages occurs and the foodstuff cannot be sold anymore. To protect sausages against these kinds of changes it is necessary to know the minimum amount of oxygen which leads to photooxidative changes. Therefore the aim of the project is to find out the amount of physically solved oxygen amounts in raw sausages and to determine if these amounts are still enough to cause undesired changes (greying). This will be done with a measuring unit developed at the Fraunhofer IVV. In general the project has following aims:

• Determination of the influence of (physically) solved oxygen on quality of easy to spread raw sausages (with 2 different contents of nitrite and 2 different fat contents) and firm raw sausages.
• Investigation of the kinetics of greying according to the available oxygen and different light sources (e.g. standard fluorescent lamps; LED) and the intensity of light.
• To investigate the influence of different headspace-to-sample-rates on oxygen-consumption kinetic and greying of raw sausages.
• Finding out an optimized packaging-solution (including an oxygen-scavenger system) by use of the above determined data.