Herramientas avanzadas de modelización matemática para el procesado de alimentos y la evaluación de la seguridad alimentaria

Abstract

There is a growing interest in mathematical modeling to address the increasingly complex problems faced by food industries in order to ensure both food quality and safety. Although the amount of available data has experienced an extraordinary increase in the last decades, its complexity does not allow, on many occasions, the use of conventional analysis tools. Therefore, it is essential to develop a new generation of mathematical tools that can be implemented in the field of food processes in an efficient way, whose results are accessible to decision-makers in order to move towards the production of higher quality and safer food. In this doctoral thesis, modeling tools applied to food safety from a microbiological and toxicological point of view are developed. New strategies and techniques are proposed that combine the existing ones to generate guidelines and recommendations to be used in decision-making by stakeholders involved in food safety and quality. The proposed tools are framed within different scientific and engineering fields, such as modeling, simulation and analysis of microbial inactivation processes, as well as methods of applied statistics and operational research to optimize processes and designs of experiments that improve the accuracy of mathematical models. The thesis is based on four of the papers published during this training period. The first two deal with the optimal design of experiments in predictive microbiology distinguishing between isothermal and non-isothermal (dynamic) experiments. They conclude with some guidelines and advice for decision-making concerning how to design the experiments to maximize the information obtained from them. On the other hand, the second block of publications deals with food safety from the abiotic point of view. In particular, the production of acrylamide in heat treatments and its relationship with other quality and safety parameters. These studies introduce optimization as a tool to solve practical problems such as the potato frying process or thermal processing of foods used in baby food (with more severe restrictions on the concentration of this type of compounds). The results indicate, on the one hand, that higher temperature processes guarantee biological food safety while minimizing acrylamide production and, on the other hand, that in certain processes such as potato frying, acrylamide levels are above the recommendations of the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) when trying to maximize other quality parameters. In addition, guidelines are also proposed that allow designing thermal processes that minimize acrylamide content while maximizing food safety and quality. Therefore, this thesis develops different methodologies to solve, guide and improve processes where food safety and quality can be affected. It provides an engineering vision to some of these problems and contributes with guidelines that can be useful for decision-making in food safety and quality.