Systems for Risk-Free Food Production

There are two purposes in cleaning (sterilizing) food during its production:

• Removal of biological and chemical substances which could cause a threat to the consumers or the producers. Some organisms cause severe sickness when consumed. For example, apple juice is sometimes made of fruits which fell to the ground; the ground, however, may be contaminated by bacteria and viruses from the dung of the animals of the farm. In this case, a thorough cleaning is essential before processing the apples into juice. Also, some chemical substances used as pesticide must be removed before consumption since they may cause sickness to the consumers.
• Reducing the growth rate of biological substances. After processing, any food will contain a tiny number of microorganisms. As a rule of thumb, the number of microorganisms under normal circumstances doubles every 24 hours. Whether food is consumable or not is, besides other factors, determined by the number of microorganisms it contains. Therefore, through reduction of the growth rate, food can be given an increased longevity.

Both Ventafresh and PhytO3 make use of ozone water and ultraviolet light as disinfectants.

Ozone has a number of properties which make it very suitable for food processing:

• Ozone is unstable and quickly degrades into oxygen after its production - usually within minutes. Therefore, consumers will never have any traces of ozone in their food.
• Ozone is a very strong disinfectant - several times stronger than chloride, for example. Thus, ozone treatment requires only low amounts of the gas.
• Ozone can be destroyed by ultraviolet (UV) light. UV is used as a complementary disinfection technique in Ventafresh and PhytO3; in addition, it causes unused ozone to be destroyed.
• Ozone is neither carcinogenic nor mutagenic.

By combining various disinfection techniques, namely ozone, ultraviolet light, and ultrasound, an extremely high degree of disinfection and decontamination can be achieved. In addition, by applying a packaging technique which is part of Ventafresh, the growth rate of microorganisms can be reduced considerably.

Thus, the shelf life of food can be increased by:

• Reducing the number of microorganisms to the smallest possible minimum before processing and packaging; and
• Reducing the growth rate of the microorganisms.