Predictive models for the shelf-life of Australian vacuum-packed beef and lamb: Development and evaluation

The Australian meat industry exports chilled vacuum-packed (VP) beef and lamb to more than one hundred markets with some of them involving containerised sea voyages of 40-50 days. On occasion, product may be subjected to loss of temperature control due to refrigeration problems, or delays leading to extended shipping times. Such deviations from expected temperature and time can have a pronounced effect on the shelf-life of the consignment, which, historically, has required sampling of the cargo for microbiological and sensory assessments prior to making a decision about the disposition of the product. This delay further adds to the loss of shelf-life. Here, we describe the development and evaluation of separate mathematical predictive models for Australian VP beef and lamb, and an accompanying Excel-based tool for rapid and accurate assessment of the remaining shelf-life based on odour quality, their initial total bacterial count, and elapsed time-temperature data. Evaluation against independent data (n = 20) showed a good agreement between predicted and observed shelf-life, with bias factors of 1.02 and 0.90, accuracy factors of 1.10 and 1.11, and mean absolute percentage errors across the validation set of 9.5% and 9.3% for beef and lamb, respectively. Although developed for Australian meat processing, packaging and distribution conditions, the models may also allow the international meat industry to manage their supply chains more effectively and reliably to ensure high quality meat products with excellent shelf-life.