Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
corresponding to a certain quality standard for other fats and oils can be found in
the relevant Official Codex Standards.
Compulsory shelf life limits can also derive from voluntary label claims. In
fact, according to the regulation, producers must guarantee product conformity
to any claim reported on the label. For instance, the amount of bioactive
compounds claimed on the label can be regarded as a shelf life acceptability
limit. The latter is thus the result of marketing considerations merging actual
product functionality, product positioning on the market and consumer
perception of the claim.
The most complex and common case is the one which is not supported by any
regulatory indication about specific constraints to be adopted as acceptability
limits. The producer is thus completely free to choose the acceptability limit
according to its own policy and quality targets. The acceptability limit may be
simply chosen by company management on the basis of the experience of the
product performance on the market or on the emulation of competitors'
products. Such procedures are obviously fraught with the risk of critical over-
estimation or disadvantageous underestimation of the shelf life. This hazard is
much more probable in the case of new foods, for which no previous experience
is available. One other approach to define the acceptability limit is based on the
application of sensory analysis, since sensory perception is often the earliest
indicator of product failure in food undergoing oxidation. In such case, the
company may decide that the product reaches the acceptability limit when it is
recognized as significantly different from the fresh one.
In some companies, descriptive sensory analysis carried out with expert
panels is applied to describe the evolution of sensory attributes potentially
responsible for consumer rejection. These data can be used to support the
acceptability limit choice by converting oxidation attribute scores into binary
data (acceptable/not acceptable) on the basis of an arbitrary predefined cut-off
value. Unfortunately, results achieved with the expert panel could be far away
from those obtained with consumers. This is due to the fact that the cut-off of the
oxidation attribute, arbitrarily chosen by the company, could have no relation to
that applied by the consumer when deciding to eat/buy the product or not. In
other words, any choice of a cut-off value for an oxidative index without clear
knowledge of its relation to consumer acceptability could induce mistakes in
shelf life guessing. For this reason, the hazard should not be focused on the
properties of the product undergoing oxidation, rather on the attitude of
consumer to accept or reject it (Hough et al., 2006).
An interesting approach is to consider the percentage of consumers rejecting
the product due to unacceptable oxidation/rancidity as an indicator of the
acceptability limit. For instance, at a given storage time, the product is certainly
still acceptable to some consumers, despite being rejected by others. The food
company can choose to be exposed to more or less risk of product failure by
selecting, as an acceptability limit, the proper percentage of consumers rejecting
the product. In other words, the acceptability limit becomes the maximum
percentage of consumers that the company can tolerate to dissatisfy. Table 9.2
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