AIB Announces New Baking Process Kill Step Calculator for Cheesecake

MANHATTAN, Kan.  – AIB International’s catalog of Baking Process Kill Step Calculators now includes a profile for cheesecakes. These calculators, along with AIB’s kill step validation consulting services, are empowering bakeries to validate their food safety preventive controls and accurately evaluate Salmonella destruction in bakery products. The FDA’s Food Safety and Modernization Act (FSMA) requires validation and verification of thermal processes to ensure product safety.

“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,” says Lakshmikantha Channaiah, Director of Microbiology at AIB International. “Under FSMA, the FDA is requiring proof of that theory; however, prior to AIB’s latest contribution, there was not publically available research to use as foundational scientific validation.”

This is the ninth calculator developed by AIB International with other calculators available for flour tortillas, yeast-raised doughnuts, nut muffins, cake muffins, whole wheat multigrain bread, crisp cookies, soft cookies, and hamburger buns. All calculators and published research information are available for free download on AIB’s website.

Commercial bakers can use these 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.