Autoclave Sterilization for the Food and Beverage Industry
Autoclave Sterilization for Food Safety, Product Quality, and Production Process Development
Lab work plays an expanding role in the food industry. With new safety recalls showing up in the news regularly, quality assurance is more important than ever. Meanwhile, in a competitive marketplace, there’s an ever-increasing demand for new products, different types of packaging, and longer shelf life without loss of flavor or quality.
Priorclave provides efficient, high-quality, non-jacketed laboratory-grade autoclaves at a fraction of the purchase and maintenance costs of the jacketed medical-grade autoclaves many companies use today. From chicken to chocolate, and beer to bagged salads, our autoclaves serve a broad spectrum of food and beverage companies around the world. A wide range of food producers, beverage makers, and packaged foods manufacturers already rely on Priorclave to help them meet brand standards and exceed food safety expectations.
Priorclave Autoclaves in the Food Industry
Pilgrim’s Pride Benchtop Sterilizer
Pilgrim’s Pride, in Pittsburg, TX, is the largest chicken supplier in the United States. In early 2015, Priorclave outfitted Pilgrim’s Pride with a benchtop autoclave for one of their facilities. Their quality assurance department had previously relied on a medical-grade tabletop sterilizer, but they struggled to keep that unit up and running under the relatively heavy workload of their daily waste processing and media prep cycles.
By replacing this jacketed, medical-grade sterilizer with a research-grade Priorclave 60L Benchtop autoclave, Pilgrim’s Pride substantially improved uptime, even as they increased the size of their work loads. The benchtop laboratory autoclave proved to be an economical choice—able to provide the requisite steam temperature and high pressure levels without undue consumption of water or energy.
The Importance of Autoclaves to Nestlé
International food and drink processing powerhouse Nestlé is the largest—and among the most recognized—publicly held food company in the world. They are best known for their universally loved chocolate products, and in recent years have begun using Priorclave autoclaves to develop new ways to approach chocolate processing.
The early stages of the long and complex road from cocoa bean to chocolate bar relies on fermentation. But the conditions that are ideal for cocoa bean fermentation are also favorable for undesirable microorganisms, bacteria, fungal spores, and molds. Those raw, fermented cocoa beans can carry potentially dangerous loads of e. coli, Salmonella, and other pathogens.
Steam sterilization can be an excellent way to safely prep these raw materials. Autoclaves don’t just reliably kill pathogens on the cocoa beans. Autoclave sterilization also enhances the beans’ color and flavor, and transforms the beans’ physical properties in a way that simplifies further processing.
In addition to using Priorclave sterilizers to explore innovative new approaches to bean preparation and processing, Nestlé also uses their Priorclaves to perform standard lab tasks, like safely handling waste, prepping media, and sterilizing glassware and other lab equipment.
Symington’s Innovative Packaging for Ready Meals
In the UK, we’ve long worked with major food processors and distributors like Symington’s, who use their Priorclaves to help them develop long-lasting, shelf-stable packaging and new products.
The food preservation process generically known as “canning” relies on retort processing—large-scale steam sterilization in room-sized autoclaves. This longtime retort method comes with problems, though: jars and cans are heavy and bulky to transport, and the process can impart a flat, metallic flavor that is often needs to be covered up with added salt and sugar.
Symington’s is innovating past these problems by developing new lightweight, flexible food packaging systems that are shelf-stable and food-safe, but better at retaining flavors. To accomplish this work, Symington’s has invested in compressed air ballast-equipped Priorclave autoclaves capable of perfectly emulating the conditions in large-scale food processing retorts, at a fraction of the cost and footprint. After working out all of the details and testing packaging prototypes on their Priorclave, they can then move directly up to large scale production.
Reliable, Flexible Sterilization for the Food and Beverage Industry
Priorclave is pleased to support the many food industry organizations working to constantly improve the quality of the products we enjoy.
Our autoclaves are built from the ground up for testing, research, and product development. They are optimized for flexibility, reliability, and energy efficiency. In contrast to a medical-grade autoclave, a Priorclave autoclave doesn’t just take something clean and make it sterile. A Priorclave can take anything—a pilot batch of preserves, a new food package system, growth media for labwork, waste loads, glassware, lab supplies—and raise it to a specific temperature and pressure for minutes, hours, days, or even months. It can allow you to perform assessments that measure conformity to regulatory and proprietary brand standards for customers and clients, and to ensure that food prep and cooking standards meet all pasteurization and sanitation best practices. Taken together, this reliability, flexibility, and efficiency make Priorclaves the ideal choice for the use of an autoclave in the food industry.
But what truly distinguishes Priorclave is customer satisfaction. Priorclave customers consistently report 93% to 100% satisfaction with their purchase over the course of years—with that rating improving the longer they’ve owned the unit. In addition, Priorclave North America is pleased to offer free lifetime technical support and consultation and one of the best warranty programs for autoclaves in the food industry.
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