{"id":2504,"date":"2017-05-16T13:55:43","date_gmt":"2017-05-16T17:55:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hiperbaric.com\/?p=2504"},"modified":"2020-09-18T10:36:25","modified_gmt":"2020-09-18T08:36:25","slug":"hpp-putting-a-new-squeeze-on-meat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hiperbaric.com\/en\/hpp-putting-a-new-squeeze-on-meat\/","title":{"rendered":"HPP: Putting a New Squeeze on Meat"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Despite the increase of vegetarian and vegan behaviours amongst western consumers and scaremongering news about meat consumption and cancer prevalence in the last years, meat processing still represents one of the most important sectors on the global food market. This is not an exception on the High Pressure Processing (HPP) sector, as meat products-dedicated machines represent 21% of HPP machines installed around the world (Hiperbaric 2017).<\/p>\n

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Meat market and consumption trends<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 2014 Global meat trade<\/a> reached a value of 122 billion USD, with a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 8% from 2007 to 2014. In physical terms, it increased from 29 million tons in 2007 to 40 million tons in 2014.<\/p>\n

The main destinations for meat imports were Japan (9%), United States. (8%), Germany (7%), Italy (6%) and China (6%) as they represent 35% of global imports. While China\u00b4s weight increased, gaining 3 percentage points, the share of Italy slightly decreased by 2 percentage points.<\/p>\n

Brazil and Australia were ranked among the main suppliers of meat after the US in 2014. It\u2019s important to say that Mexico was the main destination for American meat imports, representing up to 21% of the US meat exports and up to 82% of Mexico\u00b4s total imports. Finally, top growing exporters from 2007 to 2014 were India (+29% per year) and Poland (+12% per year). The U.S. strengthened its position in the global export structure, from 11% in 2007 to 14% in 2014.<\/p>\n

As animal welfare concerns rise amongst consumers, meat sector is perhaps the food sector which is the most subjected to criticism and pressures to reinvent itself. Companies try to comply with consumer pressures to get clean label products, minimally processed, coming from free-range animals that have not been submitted to constant antibiotic use nor had a fodder and forage based nutrition that contained GMO.<\/p>\n

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The struggle is real as consumers are demanding products that are more expensive to produce, while they aren\u2019t willing to spend the extra cost. Also, the concern about food waste has grown in the last years and it is pushing retail companies to demand longer shelf lives to their suppliers.<\/p>\n

So, how can we improve the shelf-life without preservatives and without modifying product taste?<\/p>\n

Brief look at High Pressure Technology <\/strong><\/p>\n

High Pressure technology\u2019s role as a preservative was discovered in the late 19th<\/sup> century and is often resumed as Pascalization after Blaise Pascal, who widely described effects of Pressure variation on fluids back to the 17th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n

The technology remained hidden from public for decades and was only used at lab scale until techniques for ceramic processing advanced and allowed to manufacture productive-scale machines.<\/p>\n

Although some jams and foods were processed in Japan for preservation purposes in the 90\u00b4s, first industrial-scale machines were vertical and, because of that, they couldn’t achieve pasteurising pressures nor consistently support big productions. Those machines were used for mollusk shucking<\/a> and crustacean meat extraction<\/a>, an application that requires lesser pressures and was discovered in early XXI century.<\/p>\n

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It wasn’t until the last 15 years that HPP started to raise from a marginal technology to the promising status that it has these days: It has indeed been recognised at one of the main technologies to drive the future of the Food Industry<\/a>. This turning point coincides with the first developments from Hiperbaric, which developed its horizontal HPP systems late 90s and installed its first machine in 2001 and became market leader in 2005<\/a>, a position that the company has strongly held since then. This is possible through a long-term strategy based on continuous innovation that led to developments such as the Hiperbaric 525<\/a> in 2015.<\/p>\n

HPP and Raw Meats<\/strong><\/p>\n

As fresh meat cuts are by definition minimally processed, the solution relies on physical preservative technologies. Since thermal methods and other energy-based technologies such as microwaves, radiation or UV are known to modify the physical properties, companies are looking into HPP as a solution to improve the shelf lives of their meat products as the technology is known to affect minimally product properties.<\/p>\n

Back in 2001, the US FDA evaluated some strategies for microbial inactivation and stated: \u201cGround beef can be pasteurised by HPP to eliminate E. coli<\/em> O157:H7, Listeria spp., Salmonella spp<\/em>., or Staphylococcus spp<\/em>.\u201d(Parker et al). Since then utilising HPP on the fresh meat market has grown significantly. HPP raw meat maintain their quality parameters throughout their shelf-life.<\/p>\n

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However we must keep in mind that HPP improves the shelf life by basically modifying complex molecules structures such as Carbohydrates and Proteins. As pressure modifies the internal environment of the High Pressure chamber, it affects the weaker molecular bonds inside product molecules such as Hydrogen bonds and other non-covalent bonds.<\/p>\n

Proteins are typically folded in a determinate way called quaternary structure and this is what determines their properties as a structural compound, enzyme, co-transporter, pigment and so on.<\/p>\n

Under pressure, proteins tend to unfold because of the breakdown of non-covalent bonds and, once pressure is dropped, they fold back to a new configuration. Since their quaternary structure\/shape is modified, their properties are modified and this results on lethal damage to bacteria (hurray!) but also macromolecular structures change as food proteins are also affected.<\/p>\n

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The main issue on raw meats is that both myoglobin and haemoglobin do not recover their original shape but a new one, this resulting in a change of colour to a more pale one similar to boiled raw meats. The greater the pressure applied, the deeper those changes will be (see below) also, some increase in hardness and exudation may occur.<\/p>\n

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Solutions<\/strong><\/p>\n

Actual solutions to the issue involves could be:<\/p>\n