Development and validation of a mathematical model to describe the growth of Pseudomonas spp. in raw poultry stored under aerobic conditions.

Poultry meat spoils quickly unless it is processed, stored, and distributed under refrigerated conditions. Research has shown that the microbial spoilage rate is predominantly controlled by temperature and the spoilage flora of refrigerated, aerobically-stored poultry meat is generally dominated by Pseudomonas spp. The objective of our study was to develop and validate a mathematical model that predicts the growth of Pseudomonas in raw poultry stored under aerobic conditions over a variety of temperatures. Thirty-seven Pseudomonas growth rates were extracted from 6 previously published studies. Objectives, methods and data presentation formats varied widely among the studies, but all the studies used either naturally contaminated meat or poultry or Pseudomonas isolated from meat or poultry grown in laboratory media. These extracted growth rates were used to develop a model relating growth rate of Pseudomonas to storage or incubation temperature. A square-root equation [Ratkowsky, D.A., Olley, J., McMeekin, T.A., and Ball, A., 1982. Relationship between temperature and growth rate of bacterial cultures. J. Appl. Bacteriol. 149, 1-5.] was used to model the data. Model predictions were then compared to 20 Pseudomonas and 20 total aerobes growth rate measurements collected in our laboratory. The growth rates were derived from more than 600 bacterial concentration measurements on raw poultry at 10 temperatures ranging from 0 to 25 degrees C. Visual inspection of the data and the indices of bias and accuracy factors proposed by Baranyi et al. [Baranyi, J., Pin, C., and Ross, T., 1999. Validating and comparing predictive models. Int. J. Food Micro. 48, 159-166.] were used to analyze the performance of the model. The experimental data for Pseudomonas showed a 4.8% discrepancy with the predictions and a bias of +3.6%. Percent discrepancies show close agreement between model predictions and observations, and the positive bias factor demonstrates that the proposed model over-predicts growth rate, thus, can be considered fail-safe. Both Pseudomonas spp. as well as total aerobes may be considered good indicators of poultry spoilage. A properly constructed and validated model for Pseudomonas growth under aerobic conditions can provide a fast and cost-effective alternative to traditional microbiological techniques to estimate the effects of storage temperature on product shelf-life. The model developed here may be used to determine the effect of both initial Pseudomonas concentration and storage temperature on shelf-life of poultry meat under aerobic storage conditions over temperatures from 0 to 25 degrees C.