Microbiological Safety of Radappertized Beef ¹

To assure microbiological safety and stability of irradiated meats, inoculated pack studies are performed with each meat. These studies are designed to provide partial spoilage data for computation of that dose required to reduce the number of viable spores of a single most resistant strain of Clostridium botulinum by 12 log cycles. A beef inoculated pack had only one significant partial spoilage "point" at 22 kGy. Therefore, the binomial confidence limit method was used to compute a 12D dose of 41.2 kGy. This 12D dose, together with a prveious thermal treatment of inactivate autolytic enzymes, provides a wide margin of microbiological safety and stability to packaged meats stored without refrigeration.