Food Division Microbiology

Shelf Life (Food) Testing

The Microbiological Safety and Stability of a food product is measured by its Shelf-Life of that food stuff, these important factors are influenced by storage conditions, time and temperature.

The Shelf Life of a food product is defined as the time between the production and packaging of a product and the time at which it becomes unacceptable to the customer.

Shelf Life is a combined measure of both food quality and food safety of a product and therefore the microbial testing during shelf life trials must be designed to demonstrate both of these measures.

At ILS we have the ability to store samples at a range of temperatures and in different conditions to facilitate customer requirements, temperature abuse can be factored into a shelf life trial if requested.

If you require any assistance in setting up a shelf life determination, the experienced ILS staff will be able to assist with your requirements.

We offer advice and cost effective planning to ensure that the appropriate testing is undertaken to prove that the Shelf Life determination for your food products satisfies the requirements of your customers. 

Evaluating Shelf Life

The best way to start to evaluate the shelf life of your product is to assess the requirements of your customer and the physical production limitations in you factory. You can also look at similar products on retailers shelves to give an idea of the shelf life that other manufacturers use.

Then try to establish a general shelf life by undertaking your own assessment, store your product in its final packaging and required storage temperature. Examine the product on a daily basis and follow three simple rules; if the product looks bad, smells bad or tastes bad then that is the end of your shelf life regardless of the microbiology.

After these two simple and cheap exercises you should have a rough idea of the shelf life of your product.

You will then have to decide on a test protocol, ILS can help you with this. We would need to select the appropriate organisms to test for; it would include a range of pathogenic organisms to help assess safety and spoilage organisms to monitor product quality through the life of the product. This will depend on the constituents of your product, the production process it has been through e.g. washing, heating. Also the final packaging that the product will be in e.g. air, modified atmosphere or vacuum.

Once a suite of organisms has been decided on then a testing date protocol has to be devised. This can vary greatly on length of the testing program e.g. 5 days, 1 month or 1 year along with the budget that you have and quite often who you are supplying. Many of the major retailers have their own shelf life protocols.

The major retailers often have inbuilt temperature abuse stages built into their shelf life protocols to replicate purchase and transport from stores or chill chain anomalies.

All of these stages can be discussed with our experienced team at ILS just call us and we can talk you through your requirements.

Contact ILS - for advice on shelf life testing and determination.