Meat Congress: How to Increase Storability of Foodstuffs

Today Expocentre Fairgrounds hosted the 12th International Meat Congress: How to Increase Storability of Foodstuffs as part of the Agroprodmash 2022 exhibition. The event was organised by EXPOCENTRE AO in partnership with the Gorbatov Federal Research Centre for Food Systems. The congress featured presentations by the centre's researchers, as well as company executives and meat market experts.

Yulia Yushina, head of the laboratory at the Gorbatov Federal Research Centre for Food Systems, presented an overview of GOSTs on shelf life of food products. She shared the latest research in the field of standardisation. According to the speaker, there are two reasons for studying the shelf life of a product. The first is the storability of products: the higher the shelf life of a product, the better for the manufacturer from an economic point of view. The second problem is the establishment of the true shelf life of the products being manufactured. In the expert's view, the approaches that currently exist are outdated. There is a lot of new knowledge, ideas and indicators to more accurately, intelligently assume and set expiry dates.

The head of the laboratory of the Vinogradsky Institute of Microbiology of the Russian Academy of Sciences Yury Nikolayev spoke about combating biofilms in food production facilities as one of the ways to increase the shelf life of products. "Biofilms are a microbial community consisting of many species of microorganisms enclosed in an intracellular matrix. Biofilms pose a danger to food products, being a reservoir of spoilage microbes and pathogens. They need to be studied in order to fight them successfully", stressed the speaker. He went on to point out model systems for investigating the most resistant biofilms and effective combination disinfectants against biofilms that help to increase storability of products.

Natalia Revutskaya, head of the Gorbatov Federal Research Centre for Food Systems, gave her views on the role of packaging in extending the shelf life of meat products.  She said, in particular, that packaging is an important link in the shelf life of meat products. In particular, she noted that packaging is an important link in the production chain of meat products, as meat has a nutrient composition, which is the root cause of its deterioration.

The reports by Viktoria Nosova, Dagmara Bataeva and Valentina Krylova from the Gorbatov Federal Research Centre for Food Systems were of great interest to industry representatives. They told about accelerated methods of determination of shelf life of meat and canned meat, about influence of sanitary conditions of production on safety of production, about role of pseudomonads (bacteria) in development of poultry meat spoilage.

Representatives of Cherkizovo Group and Georg Polymer spoke at the congress, who drew the audience's attention to the modern approach to establishing expiry dates and to the role of rigid moulded packaging in food preservation.