AIB Announces New Baking Process Kill Step Calculator for Flour Tortillas

AIB International’s catalog of Baking Process Kill Step Calculators now includes a profile for flour tortillas. These calculators, along with AIB’s kill step validation consulting services, are enabling bakeries to validate their food safety preventive controls and evaluate Salmonella destruction in bakery products.

This is the eighth calculator developed by AIB International with other calculators available for yeast-raised doughnuts, nut muffins, cake muffins, whole wheat multigrain bread, crisp cookies, soft cookies, and hamburger buns.

Commercial bakers can use the calculators to evaluate the lethality of a thermal process (baking) to destroy Salmonella in their products and demonstrate the effectiveness of the process to comply with FSMA’s preventive controls rule. The interactive calculators work by using oven time and temperature parameters to automatically determine the total process lethality (e.g., 5 log) for Salmonella. If the desired log reduction is achieved for the baking process and pathogen of concern, the generated report can be used as guidance and supporting documentation for FSMA’s validation and verification process.

“The food industry has long believed that all biological organisms like yeast or pathogens are killed in the oven, and critical product quality attributes are achieved,” said AIB Director of Microbiology Lakshmikantha Channaiah. “Under FSMA, FDA is requiring proof of that theory; however, prior to AIB’s latest contribution, there was not publicly available research to use as foundational scientific validation.”

AIB International collaborated with the American Bakers Association and its Food Technical and Regulatory Affairs Committee, and with researchers at Kansas State University and the University of Georgia to produce the Baking Process Kill Step Calculators. “This latest development in expanding the kill step calculator’s use now serves the baking industry more broadly,” said ABA President & CEO Robb MacKie.

All calculators and published research information are available for free download on AIB’s website, www.aibonline.org.