Let's start with an example: You have just picked up a pack of cold-smoked salmon from the supermarket chill cabinet to serve for your family lunch on Sunday. On its way from the factory to the lunch table, the salmon product has been exposed to varying temperatures. Now, how can you be sure the product is still good to eat when you take it out of the refrigerator to make sandwiches?
This is a complicated question, and the answer depends on how long and at what temperature the salmon product has been stored, its product characteristics including how strongly it was smoked and how many lactic acid bacteria it contains! But what our brains cannot easily grasp, a computer and a piece of free software from DTU Aqua can.
The software helps producers of seafood, including fresh and lightly preserved products such as cold-smoked salmon, to ensure that their products are suitable for consumption right up until the sell-by date and to prevent unacceptable growth of human pathogenic bacteria.
The Seafood Spoilage and Safety Predictor (SSSP) software can read specific temperature measurements and this can be used to evaluate the effect of the temperature variation products are actually exposed to in chill chains e.g. from processing to the supermarket chill cabinet. In fact, this information makes it possible to identify ways of improving shelf-life and food safety.
International software in 15 languages
Version 3.1 of the Seafood Spoilage and Safety Predictor (SSSP) software, as the new programme from DTU Aqua is called, was released in August 2009 and is available for download free of charge (http://sssp.dtuaqua.dk). SSSP is available in 15 different languages to improve its usefulness for a seafood sector that often operates globally. In fact, seafood raw material and final products are frequently transported long distances and across borders. At the same time, the software is an example of effective dissemination of research results, says Paw Dalgaard, a Senior Scientist at DTU Aqua. So far, the software has been downloaded by more than 4,000 companies, food inspectors, organisations and consultants from 105 countries around the world.
"We had completed extensive laboratory studies, developed mathematical models to predict shelf-life and safety of seafood and published our findings in all the right places. However, industry and the food authorities often don't have the time to seek information in that form. We therefore decided to do something else - to develop a piece of user-friendly software which provides easy access to all the information. The difficult bits, i.e. the mathematical models, have been kept out of sight, and the predictions are easy to obtain and ready to use", explains Paw Dalgaard, who developed the SSSP software together with, among others, Brian Cowan from DTU Aqua.