Development of meat-cut sanitation processes

Despite the best efforts of professionals from the slaughtering-processing sector, meat cuts from pork carcasses do not always escape contamination by pathogenic bacteria such as L. monocytogenes and Salmonella. This remains a central issue when the cuts are used to produce raw products, as the process does not appear to have a sufficiently strong sanitizing effect to eliminate these bacteria.An ongoing IFIP project has revealed that immersing meat cuts artificially contaminated with L. monocytogenes or Salmonella in either water (for three minutes at 65°C or one minute at 70°C) or a 5% lactic acid solution (for 5 minutes at 15°C or three minutes at 65°C) led to an average global reduction in initial concentration levels of at least 1 log CFU/cm2.