Safe heating and cooling in mass catering

According to the Danish catering industry, it is a challenge to keep a high culinary quality of certain foods because of the official requirements for safe holding either at hot or chilled temperatures.



For safe heating, a temperature of at least 75°C in the coldest is recommended. Equivalently for safe cooling, it is recommended to cool down from 65°C to 10°C in max. 3 h



In both cases, EU legislation gives the possibility to apply other time and temperature combinations as long as the company can document that the product is safe. However, this requires a definition of safe processes.



For this purpose Codex has suggested a management concept named Performance Criterion (PC). PC is a transparent way to link a food safety program with its expected public health impact.



Codex defines a PC as the effect on concentration of a hazard in a food that must be achieved by the application of one or more control measures to provide the wanted consumer protection.