Development of a generalised equilibrium modified atmosphere model and its application to the Taleggio cheese

Abstract

The food metabolic processes influence the gas composition of packaged products: by finely tuning the gas fluxes through the packaging, the aerobic and anaerobic respiration processes can be efficiently exploited to regulate the equilibrium gas concentrations. In this work, we present a generalised model able to predict the evolution of gases in micro-perforated equilibrium MAP, with a detailed evaluation of fluxes through the perforations by means of Computational Fluid Dynamics. It was found that the Sherwood number for the studied micro-perforations is 0.715 and it was confirmed via experiments on packaging with oxygen-depleted atmospheres. The kinetic model was experimentally validated on a smear short-ripened soft cheese (Taleggio) whose complex surface microbiota confer to the product a non-trivial respiration behaviour. Cheese slices were packed with three different micro-perforated solutions (one 120 μm diameter hole, two 90 μm diameter holes, and five 90 μm diameter holes) achieving three different equilibrium gas compositions with good model predictions. The model was applied to literature data with success, thus the model can be deemed general and applicable to many different systems. • A generalised model for equilibrium modified atmosphere packaging (EMAP) with micro-perforation is developed. • Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is used to predict diffusive fluxes through micro-perforations. • Taleggio cheese EMAP experiments are presented. • The model correctly describes the gas behavior inside the packaging for taleggio cheese and other soft cheese.