Consumers love the convenience of ready meals, but from a manufacturing perspective, the process of creating delicious and safe products that have a long shelf life can be a challenge. Dishes often consist of several par-cooked ingredients that need careful temperature monitoring in the preparation stage to satisfy HACCP regulations. The appearance of each ready meal has to be unified and consistent so that buyers do not doubt the quality or value for money. Producers know that setbacks in the cooking line can have a costly knock-on effect that compromises the entire batch of product.

The difficulty lies in ensuring that the meal is sufficiently cooked to its core before packaging so that consumers can follow the heating instructions at home and achieve the expected results without disappointment.

Multi-ingredient ready meals such as pies, pizzas and quiches have to maintain a perfect crust while their fillings and toppings––often consisting of a mixture of vegetables, meats and dairy products––have to be fully pasteurized. Temperature monitoring gives you insight and data throughout the entire cooking process, providing reassurance that everything has been cooked to perfection––including the ingredients beneath the layers of pastry––and that your products are HACCP certification-ready.

To make candy bars the manufacturer has to have a mold. Typically this is a plastic mold with multiple cavities. The mold is chilled to 15°C (60°F) and then the chocolate is poured into the mold. 

Commercial baking is an exact science that requires precision and accuracy. It's a fine balance between ingredient quantities and measured temperature control. A small variance in either of these elements could compromise your entire production line or final product quality.

Throughout the production process, from proofing to baking, your bread and confectionery goods' characteristics are affected by temperature and humidity. Regulating oven temperatures is essential in order to create delicious, appealing products that are consistent in appearance and quality – all while maintaining Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) standards.

While processing food items like poultry, meat and seafood, creating a safe and high-quality product within a limited timeframe is a priority. To effectively meet strict food safety and quality assurance standards, consistent temperature control throughout the entire cooking cycle is critical. This ensures successful validation of your cooking process and effectively eliminates harmful bacteria or other contaminants that may negatively impact output and quality. 

Our thermal profiling systems help you optimize production while meeting Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) food safety regulations with ease. The Datapaq® Food Tracker Thermal Profiling System allows you to accurately gain full temperature traceability throughout the cook, chill and freeze process. You can generate data to provide suppliers with profile reports that offer assurance of correct verification and trustworthy production certification. 

Many processed foods supplied to the food market are packaged in bottles, cans or sealed pouches. These products, as part of the processing step, need to be pasteurized/sterilized in the final packaging to guarantee food safety and extend shelf life, without any other form of preservation, such as chilling or freezing. One example is the pasteurization and sterilization of filled beer bottles in conveyorized, raining hot water and steam pasteurization lines. Batch retort sterilization at pressure is common in the processing of food products packaged in either pouches, glass jars or metal cans. Sliced meats that have already been cooked will often be flash pasteurized after the packaging process, to remove contaminant microorganisms on the meat surface in order to guarantee consumer safety.