abstract
- © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Thermal processing is the standard to design sterilization processes through the general and formula methods. Bigelow established the foundations for the current procedures of thermal food-processing design by defining the decimal reduction time (D) concept and its temperature dependence (zT). Additionally, Bigelow developed the general method to define the processing time by calculating the area under the curve when the lethality is plotted against time. Ball implemented the formula method to simplify the calculations of process lethality by generating charts and tables that correlate the temperature profile of the food product with microbial inactivation kinetics data.