CHEMICAL BIOCHEMICAL DETECTION OF SPOILAGE

Although sensory and/or microbiological analyses are widely relied on when assigning shelf-life of foods or trouble shooting problems with s poilage under storage, they do have drawbacks. Delay in obtaining resu lts is one of them. The expense of the expert panels required to obtai n meaningful sensory evaluations is another, while spoilage is not alw ays of microbial origin. Even when it is, there are an increasing numb er of situations, including that of meals and fish packaged in modifie d atmospheres, where the relationships between microbial growth and sp oilage onset is poorly defined. Chemical analysis has long been recogn ized as a means of circumventing at least some of concluded that chemi cal characterization of spoilage processes is presently of most value in trouble shooting i.e., establishing the causes of spoilage. Its val ue in assigning total or remaining shelf-life requires more knowledge of the chemical processes leading to reduced acceptability/spoilage an d of their correlations with sensory and microbiological changes.