Multivariate accelerated shelf‐life testing: a novel approach for determining the shelf‐life of foods

In order to meet consumers' expectations for high‐quality products, food industries must conduct shelf‐life studies that many times include the assessment of several analytical and sensory properties. However, whenever a new product is to be launched onto the market, defining which are the most relevant properties to monitor, as well as their cut‐off criterion, is the subject of strong debate. Besides, for products with long estimated shelf‐lives, accelerated studies have to be conducted and a third parameter has to be estimated: the acceleration factor which defines the correlation between the different storage conditions. In this study we propose a new approach for determining the shelf‐life of industrialised food products, the Multivariate Accelerated Shelf‐Life Test (MASLT), in which a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is performed and the scores of the time‐related components are taken for estimating the multivariate rate constants ( k m ), the multivariate acceleration factor (α m ) and the multivariate activation energy (Ea m ). The method was successfully applied to a single‐concentrated industrialised tomato product for which the actual shelf‐life was estimated to be 28 months. Pseudo‐zero‐order kinetics resulted in the multivariate parameters α 35,25 m = 2.7 and Ea m = 150 kJ·mol −1 .