Mild Thermal Process Combined with Vanillin Plus Citral to Help Shorten the Inactivation Time for Listeria innocua in Orange Juice

Abstract

The response of Listeria innocua (surrogate for Listeria monocytogenes) to combined treatments involving moderate temperatures (57 to 61 °C) and the addition of different levels of citral (0 to 75 ppm) was assessed to obtain a minimally processed orange juice. The presence of citral notoriously increased the bactericidal effect of mild heating treatment. This effect did not depend on the amount of added citral at all assayed temperatures. In a second stage, combinations of two natural antimicrobials (vanillin and citral) were assessed in order to find the most effective inactivation treatment in orange juice. Vanillin (900–1,100 ppm) and citral (25 ppm) combined with mild heating treatment (52 or 57 °C) were tested against L. innocua in orange juice. The addition of 900 ppm vanillin and 25 ppm citral halved or more the time required to achieve five logarithmic cycles of reduction at both temperatures with respect to thermal treatment without antimicrobial addition. The increase in the maximum growth rate calculated from the modified Gompertz model properly correlated with the increasing vanillin level for a given citral concentration. Complementary information was obtained from successfully fitting a Weibullian model to the nonlinear semilogarithmic survival curves: The addition of vanillin and citral significantly increased the bactericidal effect of mild thermal treatment, changing the distribution of inactivation times and obtaining narrower frequency shapes with lower variance and mode values. The combination of vanillin and citral with mild heating treatment resulted in an innovative alternative to minimize detrimental effects caused by thermal processing of fruit juices. In addition, a consumer panel evaluated them with an acceptable overall pleasantness.