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Dr. Charles Seizer,
National Center for Food Safety and Technology
(Taken from the transcript)
My name is Chuck Seizer, and I'm the Director of the National Center for Food Safety and Technology. The National Center for Food Safety and Technology is a group of 60 member companies, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Illinois Institute of Technology, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. We work entirely on food safety problems and food safety solutions.
After listening to the discussion at this workshop, I think one conclusion is inescapable. There is going to have to be some sort of final intervention process in order to assure the safety of juice products. There are also a number of technologies that are out there that I think are pretty good candidates for being able to improve the safety of cider.
One that immediately comes to mind is some sort of light processing. UV light processing seems to be fairly inexpensive. As soon as the petition approval is through, it will be a very nice technology that even small cider producers can implement.
There are some other light technologies out there that should be considered. There is pulsed light. There are also people that are using Excimer lamps, which are essentially lasers, that do a very similar job. However, the cost of this technology is way up because it is more sophisticated. I think that's one thing that we need to avoid.
There's also a technique called high pressure processing that is being used. This technology would subject juice to pressures of 60,000 pounds per square inch or higher. An advantage of this technology is that it will handle particles. It works very nicely for juice, and you get a product that is very, very similar to your raw fresh product. Once again, there is going to be a cost issue because the equipment is very expensive, and it would probably be prohibitive for most small cider companies.
Another technology that we have not looked at recently is the use of membrane filters to clean up cider. You can effectively remove 100 percent of the microorganisms from cider using 0.2 micron membranes. The problem with this is that it also will make your apple juice as clear as can be, and it will not look like what your normal natural cider looks like. Further, if you try to filter cider, you're going to clog your membranes in a matter of seconds, so you have to go through some pre-filtering. What you may be able to do, though, is to take part of the cider that won't go through the filter and give that a thermal treatment or something else, and then mix it back in with unpasteurized raw cider and come up with a raw product. That would be one alternative for producing a raw product, but there are some significant limitations. That technology is coming along, so maybe in a few years there will be something available there.
I think the area that is probably the most feasible is thermal, and I say that from two perspectives. One is removing heat, and the other is adding heat. The processes where you freeze cider look to be very efficacious, and likewise on the other side, where you add heat and bring it up to pasteurization temperature, looks like they're very good.
One thing that we have to be careful of is that we don't try to apply dairy technology, per se, to the thermal processing. Dairy equipment is designed for milk and not for apples, and there's a lot of differences. For one thing, the plates are not going to be in contact with the juice because you have pulp that's going through there, and the pulp will hang up on the dairy plates.
Another obvious example is that you don't have a homogenizer in line for doing apple cider, and you don't have some of the issues of control that go along with that. Likewise, especially for an aseptic operation, you're not going to want to have a flow diversion valve in the typical dairy sense because that introduces a significant microbiological risk. There are going to have to be some adaptations of the technology for high acid, and high acid pasteurized products have an incredible good track record. We need to take some of the experience that they have and incorporate that into any guidance that comes out in regulations.
What else is left? Pulsed electric field, for example, is fairly high technology, fairly expensive, and probably not going to do the job for you.
All these processes share a lot of common challenges that must be considered. Number one, you're going to have to find out how to start the equipment up, how to get it sterile, and put it in forward flow. We need to get it into forward flow so that we know the timing is correct, so that the product receives the processes it needs to receive.
We also need to deal with control factors. We need to know what to do in the event of a deviation. For example, if you're running one of the light pasteurizing units and one of the lamps burns out, what do you do with that product? You can discount the price and try to sell it today, or do you run it back through the system. Knowing what to do is a real concern.
How do you keep records? And record-keeping is one of the things that small producers have the most difficulty with. You need to keep good records. When did you put the juice into freezing, how long does it take to freeze, how long do I have to wait before I pull it out? These are going to be questions.
And then the last issue, of course, is training. So I think the big job that we have ahead is to get some sort of guidance out for some of these new technologies that are available, and just to start getting the training going.
