Research centre gives sterilization method thumbs up

The French national food conservation research centre (CTCPA), in a report last month, said it tested UK-based Zinetec’s Shaka process by evaluating its effectiveness with a range of convection and conduction product, both with and without lumps, such as béchamel, soup, ratatouille, sausages with lentils and vegetables in a sauce.

The research centre said for each product it observed a reduction in the overall sterilization cycle time, of up to seven times compared with a static retort.

According to Zinetec, the sterilization technology can be used with many canned, flexible packed and bottled food products and is most applicable to soups and sauces, ready meals, spreads and dips, beverages, chopped vegetables and baby foods.

Sterilization standard​

The company hopes the technology becomes the new standard for treating canned and other ambient storage packaged products.

John Emanuel, chairman of Utek Europe, which is marketing the technology to machine makers and food processing companies on Zinetec's behalf, said that many leading food companies are now developing food products based on the Shaka process in pilot plants.

Product testing​

He told FoodProductionDaily.com that the first market tests of these products are scheduled for December 2008 or January 2009.

Emanuel said that pilot and semi-industrial retorts are available from manufacturers such as Allpax in the US and Steriflow in France, but production units will not be available until next year.

He claims the Shaka method will help companies lift their current canned foods brands into a better competitive position against the growing market for fresher foods in the chilled, fresh cut and ‘natural’ categories: “We can get a chill quality at a can price.”​

Viscous products​

Emanuel said the Shaka process, while competing directly with aseptic technology, offers more advantages in that it can be used with viscous products.

“Whereas aseptic is currently more suited to high volume, thin liquid food products such as ​UHT​ milk, the Shaka process has the edge in that it can be applied to products with particles and lumps such as carrots in baby food,”​ explained Emanuel.

He added that capital costs using a Shaka based machine are on par with conventional retorts but the outcome is much better quality food in the fact that the Zinetec method enables an increased rate of heat penetration, improved uniformity of heating, the use of higher temperatures for faster sterilization, which results in significant energy savings for the processor.