Food Science and Technology Support
Food Science and Technology Support is ASC’s science led technical service covering shelf life and stability, product development and reformulation, process validation, microbiological specification setting, sensory work and defect investigation. Every conclusion rests on measured evidence rather than practice.
Consulting is charged hourly. A full implementation is quoted on scope once ASC has seen the site and the size of the gap, and ASC will tell you before the quote if the work is smaller than you think.
Food Science and Technology Support is ASC’s technical service for food businesses that need product questions answered with chemistry, microbiology and process engineering rather than opinion. It covers shelf life determination, product development, reformulation, process validation, microbiological specifications, sensory evaluation, defect investigation and applied research. A management system tells you a hazard is controlled. Food science tells you why the control works, at what limits it stops working, and what happens when a raw material, a process setting or a distribution route changes.
Most technical problems arrive at a factory disguised as something else. A complaint about mould inside the date mark is really a question about water activity, crumb pH and the undissociated fraction of the preservative at that pH. A sauce that separates in one region and not another is a question about the temperature route and whether the stabiliser system tolerates it. A rejected export consignment is often a question about whether an additive is permitted in that food category, at that level, in the destination market.
A food safety consultant builds and audits systems, and ASC does that work every week. A system will not tell you whether a reduced sugar recipe still carries enough hurdle to survive a summer in an unrefrigerated chain, whether a thermal process delivers the log reduction the target organism requires, or whether a supplier’s certificate of analysis measures the right thing by the right method. Those answers need someone who reasons from pKa values, water activity, heat penetration data and recipe arithmetic.
ASC designs the studies, specifies the tests, interprets the data and writes the conclusion. ASC does not operate its own analytical laboratory, so testing is placed with accredited laboratories and ASC stays independent of the result it interprets. ASC is not a certification body either: that decision belongs to an accredited certification body after its own third party audit. Consulting is charged hourly and a full project is quoted once the scope is agreed.
The science led approach
A conclusion is only worth having if the mechanism behind it can be written down and the size of the effect estimated. A change that shifts pH by 0.02 units is real in sign and invisible in practice. A change that shifts pH by half a unit across the pKa of the preservative in the recipe is not small at all, though the recipe document shows only one line altered.
Take the commonest reformulation brief ASC receives: reduce the sugar in an ambient, acid preserved product such as a cordial, a sauce or a fruit filling. Sugar is not only sweetness. It is soluble solids, so removing it raises water activity and widens the range of osmotolerant yeasts and xerophilic moulds that can grow in the pack. And because sweetness suppresses perceived sourness, removing sugar makes the product taste sharper, which almost always brings a request from the sensory panel to pull the acid back. That request is where trouble starts.
Suppose the product is preserved with sodium benzoate and sits at pH 3.8. Benzoic acid has a dissociation constant close to pH 4.2, and only the undissociated acid crosses the microbial cell membrane and does the preserving work. The undissociated fraction is one divided by one plus ten raised to the power of pH minus pKa, which puts roughly 72 percent of the benzoate in the active form at pH 3.8. Let the acid be trimmed so the product now sits at pH 4.4, and the same calculation gives roughly 39 percent. The label still declares the same preservative at the same dose, the certificate of analysis still passes, and the effective preservative concentration has almost halved while the raised water activity has lowered a second hurdle.
Sorbic acid, by contrast, has a dissociation constant close to pH 4.8, so at pH 4.4 a sorbate system is still around 72 percent undissociated where benzoate is down to 39 percent. Choosing between them is a calculation rather than a preference, and it is why ASC evaluates preservation at the upper pH bound of the specification rather than at the target.
Key facts at a glance
What ASC does for you
Shelf life determination and stability studies
Shelf life is the point at which a defined failure criterion is reached, so ASC agrees those criteria before any sample goes into storage: microbiological limits, sensory rejection thresholds, texture and colour bounds, and oxidation markers where lipids are present. ASC then builds the hurdle inventory: water activity, pH, the preservative system and its undissociated fraction at the actual product pH, packaging barrier and headspace, and the temperature the product really sees in trade.
The design is a real time trial at the declared condition, a bracketing arm at an abused condition, and an accelerated arm only where the failure mechanism justifies it, with a challenge test protocol placed at an accredited laboratory where the risk warrants it. The output is a dossier of criteria, design, data and interpretation, and a defensible date mark under R146 of 1 March 2010.
Product development and new product launch
Development runs as a gated project against a written brief stating the sensory target, cost envelope, claimed profile, intended shelf life, pack format and the markets the product must be legal in. Benchtop work uses full traded ingredient specifications rather than headline names, because commercial preparations arrive on carriers such as maltodextrin or inulin and flavour houses ship antioxidants inside flavourings. Every component is checked against the additive permissions for that food category and against carry over into the finished product.
Scale up is where most bench successes die: a hydrocolloid that hydrates perfectly in a beaker behaves differently in a jacketed vessel with another impeller and a longer heat up. Launch readiness pulls together the finished specification, the HACCP study amended for the new process, artwork and nutrition information developed against R146 of 1 March 2010, and a shelf life study started from the first commercial batch.
Reformulation, sugar, salt and fat reduction, and clean label
Reformulation is the discipline of understanding what a change drags with it. Sugar reduction moves water activity, viscosity, bulk and perceived acidity, and usually pulls the preservation system with it. Salt reduction moves far more than sodium: in processed meat it drives myofibrillar protein extraction, water holding and bind, so cutting it changes yield and texture as well as microbial hurdle, and in bakery it moderates yeast activity and gluten development. Where the sodium reduction regulation made under the Foodstuffs, Cosmetics and Disinfectants Act 54 of 1972 applies, the reduction has to be engineered rather than trimmed.
Fat reduction removes a flavour carrier and a structural phase at once. On a clean label brief, the oxidative stability a removed chelator or antioxidant provided must come from packaging barrier, headspace management, a natural antioxidant, or a shorter declared life. ASC enumerates every knock on: ingredient list recomputed by mass, nutrition table re-analysed, pH and water activity specification reissued and preservation re-verified, artwork revised, and a new recipe version identifier issued.
Process validation and thermal processing
Validation asks whether a process run at its stated parameters reliably achieves the reduction in the target organism the hazard analysis requires. That differs from monitoring, which asks whether the process ran to parameter today, and from verification, which asks whether the system works over time. A low acid canned product, an acidified product held below pH 4.6, a chilled ready to eat product where Listeria monocytogenes governs, and a low moisture product where Salmonella governs and thermal resistance rises as water activity falls each demand a different process.
ASC designs the heat penetration study, specifies thermocouple placement to find the genuine slowest heating point rather than a convenient one, and defines the data needed on come up time, holding time and temperature, and cooling rate. Post process contamination gets equal attention, because a validated kill step protects nothing if cooling water, seal integrity or the filler environment reintroduces the organism.
Microbiological risk, specifications and sampling plans
A specification listing organisms without methods, limits and a sampling plan is not a specification. ASC builds criteria the way Codex sets them out in the principles and guidelines for the establishment and application of microbiological criteria related to foods: a defined food and process, a justified organism list, a named method with its performance, a sampling plan with the number of units and the acceptance criteria, and a decision rule for results that exceed the limit.
Indicators such as total viable count, Enterobacteriaceae or Escherichia coli report on process hygiene and move early and often. Pathogens report on safety but are usually absent, so a negative result carries far less information than people assume. ASC sets indicator limits from the process capability the site can demonstrate, and designs environmental monitoring on the same logic: zoning outward from product contact, a swab schedule weighted to the harbourage sites that matter, and a trend rule that triggers investigation before a product result does.
Sensory evaluation and consumer testing
Sensory work fails most often because the wrong test was chosen for the question. Whether a reformulated product is perceptibly different from the current one is a discrimination question, run as a triangle, duo trio or tetrad design with enough assessors to give the result power. How it is different is a descriptive panel question. Whether consumers like it is a hedonic question, put to naive consumers from the target group.
ASC sets the protocol properly: balanced presentation order, blind coding, controlled serving temperature and volume, palate cleansing, and a sample size fixed before the test rather than after the result. A triangle test that does not reach significance is not proof that two products are identical, it is a failure to demonstrate a difference at the power the test had.
Troubleshooting and defect investigation worked to root cause
ASC investigates defects as a differential diagnosis, and assembles the evidence before entertaining any hypothesis: affected batch codes and their boundaries, retained samples assessed against unaffected retains, batch and process records, lot traceability, cleaning records, maintenance work orders, and the distribution conditions the stock saw. An investigation that starts with a favourite theory finds it.
The defect is then placed in a category and the mechanism written down. Microbial spoilage narrows by organism type and by what the product’s hurdles would and would not have permitted. Chemical defects such as rancidity, light induced off flavour, sulphide staining in canned protein products or Maillard browning each have a pathway with identifiable reagents and conditions, and a pathway needing a reagent the formulation does not contain is discarded. The test is whether the mechanism explains the observed distribution of the defect.
Specifications, technical data sheets and supplier certificates of analysis
Most technical failures ASC investigates trace back to an incomplete raw material specification. ASC writes specifications that state identity and grade, full composition including additives by functional class and name or INS number, allergen status covering the ingredient, its carriers, its processing aids and the supplier’s own cross contact risk, microbiological limits with the methods that produce them, contaminant limits, physical parameters such as particle size, moisture or viscosity, shelf life and storage, and country of origin.
Certificates of analysis are reviewed rather than filed. ASC checks that the certificate refers to the batch actually delivered, that the method named is capable of the limit claimed, that the limit of quantification sits below the specification limit rather than on it, and that a result reported as not detected states the level it was not detected at. A value wildly out of line with the recipe is a question for the laboratory, not a number to be quietly replaced.
Nutritional analysis and the labelling interface
Every declared nutrition value must trace to a recipe quantity or an analytical result, and ASC reconciles the two before a label goes to artwork. Calculation from recipe shows which ingredient drives which value. Analysis is the right tool where the process changes composition, where cooking losses concentrate the product, or where a claim must be defensible. A figure neither can produce is a figure with no provenance.
Energy is derived using the prescribed conversion factors, not by adding up whatever a supplier sheet quoted, and values move between a per 100 g basis and a per 100 ml basis through the measured density of the finished product. The work then meets R146 of 1 March 2010: the ingredient list recomputed in descending order of mass at the time of manufacture, compound ingredients broken out, allergens declared consistently with the specifications, additives carrying a functional class with a name or number, and claims checked against the conditions that permit them. ASC also runs a full labelling and regulatory advisory service where the work reaches the pack.
Applied research and technical literature review
Some questions cannot be answered from the plant floor: whether a novel ingredient is viable in a given matrix, whether a processing technique will deliver the required lethality without wrecking the sensory profile, or how a regulatory change in an export market will land on an existing range.
ASC works from primary sources: regulation text rather than a summary of it, Codex standards and codes of practice in their own words, peer reviewed literature rather than a supplier’s citation of it, and trial data rather than recollection. Where a supplier claim rests on a study in a different matrix, dose or organism, that gap is named. The output is a technical position paper naming the sources searched, what the evidence does and does not support, and a recommended work package.
How ASC helps, in practice
The scenarios below are illustrative composites, written to show the shape of the problems ASC is called into and how the reasoning runs. They name no client and report no measured outcome.
A sauce that separated only in summer distribution
A shelf stable sauce performed normally through winter and then drew separation complaints from certain regions in the warmer months. Retains from the same batches, held at the factory, showed no defect, so the site had concluded the trade was mishandling stock.
ASC stopped treating the distribution chain as an assumption and measured it, with temperature loggers on the actual lanes including time in unrefrigerated cross dock and on shelf. That profile was reproduced in a cabinet on current production alongside factory retains, so the two populations differed only in thermal history. ASC then examined the starch type and its retrogradation behaviour, the xanthan and locust bean interaction and its response to the salt and acid in the recipe, and finished product pH relative to the isoelectric region of any protein present.
It produced a stability protocol tied to the real distribution profile, a revised specification carrying an explicit upper temperature bound and the on pack storage statement, and a stabiliser bracketing trial plan.
A bakery product going mouldy inside its date mark
A packaged bakery line returned mould complaints well before the printed best before date, sporadically and not tracking with any raw material lot. Dosing records were in order and the preservative certificate of analysis passed, so the internal theory was a supplier problem.
ASC measured water activity at the crumb centre and again near the crust, because a single average hides the moisture gradient mould exploits, and measured pH on the crumb rather than a convenient slurry. The undissociated fraction of the preservative acid at that measured pH was recomputed, since that fraction and not the declared dose governs efficacy. The problem was then treated as post bake recontamination until proven otherwise, the bake step being lethal to mould spores, so the cooling area, slicer, air handling and packing environment were audited as the exposure window.
It produced a hurdle map showing where the protection came from, revised water activity and pH targets with the preservative system reconsidered against measured pH, an environmental monitoring plan for the cooling and packing zone, and a reconfirmation protocol.
A metal detector that would not hold its sensitivity on a wet product
A high moisture, high salt product could not consistently pass its test piece checks. Settings that worked at the start of a run drifted during it, and the site had been progressively opening up the reject settings to keep the line running, which is where a critical control point stops controlling anything.
ASC diagnosed product effect rather than equipment failure. A wet, salty product is conductive and presents a signal that shifts in phase with moisture, temperature and salt distribution, which is why stainless steel, whose own signal is weak and phase shifted, is the hardest contaminant to find in that matrix. ASC worked through aperture size relative to pack dimensions, product orientation, whether the film carried a metallised layer, and whether the technology in place could compensate for a product effect of that magnitude. Test piece practice was reviewed too, since a piece passed through the centre of the aperture reports a far better sensitivity than the product sees at the least sensitive position.
It produced a detection capability study for ferrous, non ferrous and stainless test pieces at the worst case position, a corrected challenge regime, critical limits rewritten to what the equipment can hold, and a specification to put to suppliers.
A reduced sugar reformulation that failed on shelf life
A reduced sugar version of an established ambient product passed its sensory gate, then produced yeast growth and pack swelling in the shelf life trial. The development team had matched sweetness carefully and had changed, as they saw it, only the sweetener system.
ASC reconstructed the change as a full mass balance rather than a single recipe line. Removing sugar had raised water activity, the high intensity sweetener had arrived on a bulking carrier contributing its own solids and requiring declaration, and the sensory rebalancing had reduced the acid addition, raising finished product pH. Running that pH shift through the preservative arithmetic made the loss of efficacy visible, and the two lowered hurdles compounded rather than added.
It produced a gap analysis of every parameter that had moved, a corrected hurdle design, a challenge test protocol, and a recomputed ingredient list and nutrition table.
A foreign body complaint traced to a maintenance part
A consumer returned a hard fragment found in a packaged product. It was not metal, so the metal detector had been blind to it, and the glass and hard plastic register showed no breakages for the period.
The fragment went to an external laboratory for polymer identification rather than being matched by eye, since visual matching of dark plastics is unreliable and the identification is what makes the rest of the investigation possible. While that ran, ASC built a timeline from the batch code on the complaint pack, pulling production and changeover records and, critically, maintenance work orders and engineering stores issues for the surrounding days, a document set these investigations often skip. The identified polymer was then compared against the material specifications for wear parts on that line, including scrapers, gaskets, guides and conveyor components.
It produced an investigation report tracing the fragment to a wear part and a specific engineering intervention, a corrective action requiring parts fitted in a food contact position to be recorded against line and batch, a register covering hard plastic wear parts, and a revised risk assessment.
What you receive
| Deliverable | What it contains |
|---|---|
| Shelf life and stability report | The hurdle assessment, the study design, the real time and accelerated data, and the date mark with its conditions. |
| Formulation and reformulation dossier | Recipe arithmetic with the basis stated, what the substitution does and does not replicate, and the knock-ons through preservation, nutrition and cost. |
| Process validation file | The target organism and the reasoning for it, measured come up, holding and cooling data, and critical limits. |
| Microbiological specification and sampling plan | The organisms tested and why, the methods, the limits and their basis, the sampling plan and the action on a failure. |
| Investigation report | The symptom, the analyses run, the hypotheses eliminated, the root cause where the evidence supports one, and the corrective action. |
| Specification and data sheet pack | Finished product and raw material specifications, data sheets, and supplier documents reviewed against certificates of analysis. |
Read, train and reference
Everything below is published and free to open. The courses are on the ASC training site, the articles are from the ASC library, and the Codex texts are the primary sources ASC works from rather than summaries of them.
ASC articles
Written by ASC for South African food businesses.
- Best before and use by, and how to set a date mark you can defend
- Allergen management, the complete guide for South African food businesses
- Common food labelling mistakes and how to correct them
- Health and nutrition claims, what you can and cannot say on a label
- Sodium reduction legislation for South African foodstuffs
- The difference between food safety and food quality explained
- Listeria and what it means for your process
- Plant based meat, the composition and labelling rules explained
- Maximum limits for pesticide residues in South Africa
- The ultimate guide to South African food legislation
Online training
Accredited courses on ascfoodsafetytraining.com, at your own pace.
Codex Alimentarius
The international reference texts behind this work.
- Codex General Principles of Food Hygiene, CXC 1-1969
- Codex Code of Practice on Food Allergen Management for Food Business Operators, CXC 80-2020
- Codex General Standard for Food Additives, CXS 192-1995, searchable in GSFA Online
- Codex General Standard for Contaminants and Toxins in Food and Feed, CXS 193-1995
- Codex General Standard for the Labelling of Prepackaged Foods, CXS 1-1985
- Codex Guidelines on Nutrition Labelling, CXG 2-1985
- Codex Principles and Guidelines for the Establishment and Application of Microbiological Criteria Related to Foods, CXG 21-1997
Standards and toolkits
ASC standards guidance and editable document toolkits.
- ASC food safety and quality standards resource hub
- ASC food safety and quality legislation resources
- ASC FSMS document template toolkits
- ASC FSMS risk assessment templates with instructional videos
- R638 of 22 June 2018, the general hygiene requirements explained
- ASC labelling and regulatory advisory service
Who this work suits
This service suits any business whose product has a formulation, a process and a date on it. In South Africa that means dairy processors, red meat and poultry processors and further processed meat plants, bakeries and millers, sauce, condiment and spice blending operations, snack and confectionery manufacturers, beverage producers making cordials, juices and carbonated soft drinks, fruit and vegetable canners, dried fruit operations, fish processing, and ready to eat and chilled convenience manufacturers. It also suits packhouses and juice concentrate operations where post harvest handling and shelf life meet export specifications, and contract manufacturers carrying the technical risk for somebody else’s brand.
It suits importers and own brand retail suppliers particularly well, because those businesses sign a specification they did not write and inherit the liability that comes with it, and because an imported product must satisfy the labelling regulation, R146 of 1 March 2010, and the additive and contaminant rules that apply in South Africa regardless of what was legal where it was made. It suits food service groups running central production units, where general hygiene requirements under R638 of 22 June 2018 sit alongside real product development work. And it suits certified businesses whose auditor is asking for validation evidence, shelf life justification or specification rationale nobody in the building can produce. ASC is SAATCA registered, a FoodBev SETA Accredited Provider No. 587/00337/1900, and B-BBEE Level 1.
Where ASC stops
ASC is not a certification body. ASC does not certify anyone, does not award a certificate against any scheme, and cannot guarantee a certification result. That decision belongs to an accredited certification body after its own third party audit. ASC does not operate the analytical laboratory either: testing is placed with accredited laboratories, while ASC designs the study and interprets what comes back. Where a conclusion needs data that does not exist, ASC says the work has to be done rather than writing the conclusion first.
Frequently asked questions
Can we shorten a shelf life study with accelerated testing?
Sometimes, and only for certain failure modes. Accelerated storage works where the limiting mechanism is temperature dependent in a predictable way, such as lipid oxidation, vitamin loss or colour change. It works badly for microbiological shelf life, because raising the temperature changes which organism wins and can produce a failure the product would never show at its declared storage condition. ASC normally runs an accelerated arm to rank formulation options and a real time arm on commercial production to set the date that goes on pack.
Do you run the laboratory tests yourselves?
No, and that is deliberate. ASC does not operate its own analytical laboratory. ASC designs the study, specifies which tests are needed and by which method, selects and briefs an accredited laboratory, reviews the raw data including method performance and measurement uncertainty, and writes the interpretation. Keeping testing separate from interpretation means ASC has no commercial interest in the number that comes back, which matters when a result decides whether stock is released or destroyed.
We already have a food safety consultant. What does a food scientist add?
A food safety consultant builds and maintains the system that demonstrates hazards are controlled. A food scientist establishes whether the control is technically sound in the first place, and answers the product questions the system cannot. The two overlap at exactly the points auditors probe hardest: the validation evidence behind a critical limit, the justification for a shelf life, and the substantiation behind a label claim. If someone has asked for the science behind a number and nobody in the building can produce it, that is the gap this service fills.
Can you get a product ready for export, including the technical and labelling check?
Yes, within a defined scope. ASC reviews the formulation against the additive permissions, contaminant limits and compositional standards that apply in the destination market, checks the labelling and claims against that market’s requirements, and assesses whether the declared shelf life is supportable over the actual transport route and duration rather than a nominal one. Where a destination market requires an official certificate or an inspection, that is issued by the relevant authority and not by ASC.
What do you need from us before a reformulation project can start?
A written brief and honest documents. The brief should state what must not change, usually the sensory target and the cost envelope, and what must change, which might be a nutrient reduction, an ingredient removal or a claim. The documents are the current recipe with quantities, full traded specifications for every raw material including carriers and processing aids, the finished product specification with pH, water activity and microbiological limits, the current label, and any complaint or shelf life history. Where a document does not exist ASC says so at the start, because most reformulation failures trace back to a specification nobody had read.
Will ASC certify our product, or sign off our shelf life for us?
No on both counts. ASC is not a certification body and does not certify products, sites or systems. That decision belongs to an accredited certification body after its own third party audit. On shelf life, legal responsibility for the date mark and for the safety and quality of the product rests with the manufacturer under the Foodstuffs, Cosmetics and Disinfectants Act 54 of 1972 and the labelling regulation, R146 of 1 March 2010. What ASC provides is the study design, the data, the interpretation and a technical opinion your business can rely on when it makes and defends that decision.
Send ASC the question the evidence has to answer
A date mark you cannot defend, a reformulation that has stalled, a process that was never validated, or a defect that keeps returning. Send the product detail and the question, and ASC will tell you what evidence would settle it.
Not ready for a quote? Use Where Do I Start to see which standard your market actually needs, or book a virtual consultation.