Dehydrated foods: Are they microbiologically safe?

ABSTRACT

Dried foods are low water activity foods with water activity ranging from 0.03 to 0.7. They are commonly misconstrued to be inherently safe from food borne pathogenic bacteria. However, there are many reported cases where many food borne illnesses were caused by the consumption of dried foods contaminated with Salmonella spp., Cronobacter spp., Staphylococcus spp. and E. coli. In this work, we have systematically reviewed the literature dealing with the effect of drying/dehydration on the survival of pathogenic microorganisms with special focus on Salmonella spp. We have also reviewed and synthesized the literature dealing with the effect of drying process on microorganisms in dried vegetables, meat, fish, spices, mushroom and powdered foods. This review concludes that dried foods are not inherently safe microbiologically and required other hurdles to achieve microbial safety.

KEYWORDS:

• Dehydrated foods
• microbial safety
• food borne illness
• Salmonella
• Cronobacter sakazakii

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the financial support from National Key R&D Program of China (Contract No. 2017YFD0400901), Jiangsu Province (China) Agricultural Innovation Project (Contract No. CX(17)2017), Jiangsu Province(China) “Collaborative Innovation Center for Food Safety and Quality Control” Industry Development Program, Jiangsu Province Key Laboratory Project of Advanced Food Manufacturing Equipment and Technology (No. FMZ201803), all of which enabled us to carry out this study.

Additional information

Funding

National Key R&D Program of China (Contract No. 2017YFD0400901), Jiangsu Province (China) Agricultural Innovation Project (Contract No. CX(17)2017), Jiangsu Province (China) “Collaborative Innovation Center for Food Safety and Quality Control” Industry Development Program, Jiangsu Province Key Laboratory Project of Advanced Food Manufacturing Equipment and Technology 695 (No. FMZ201803).