Inactivation kinetics of Salmonella spp. under thermal and emerging treatments: A review

Salmonella spp. has recently been involved in a number of food-borne outbreaks with a high impact on pharmaceuticals, food safety, and the economy. These outbreaks have increased the need to understand the behavior of this microorganism under conventional and new technologies applied to reduce its presence in food products. In the last twenty years, a number of emerging food processing technologies have been proposed as alternatives to thermal food processing. Studies have proven that these technologies ensure microbial inactivation while producing foods with better nutritional and sensory characteristics. Salmonella is one of the target microorganisms under study for these novel technologies showing encouraging results. Salmonella inactivation using conventional and novel technologies often does not follow first order kinetics, posing the need for models that adequately describe its survival curves and have predictive ability. This manuscript presents a summary of some of the emerging technologies used to inactivate Salmonella species in different food products and model systems, along with their inactivation patterns. It also reviews the models currently proposed to describe and estimate Salmonella inactivation under conventional thermal treatments and their applicability and limitations to characterize the survival curves obtained during exposure to novel technologies.

► Inactivation of Salmonella spp. under thermal and emerging technologies is reviewed.
► Salmonella inactivation often follows nonlinear kinetics.
► The efficacy and limitations of several models are discussed.
► Adequate modeling requires including the contribution of every lethal factor.