The forgotten role of food cultures

Fermentation is one of if not the oldest food processing technique, yet it is still an emerging field when it comes to its numerous mechanisms of action and potential applications. The effect of microbial activity on the taste, bioavailability and preservation of the nutrients and the different food matrices has been deciphered by the insights of molecular microbiology. Among those roles of fermentation in the food chain, biopreservation remains the one most debated. Presumably because it has been underestimated for quite a while, and only considered - based on a food safety and technological approach - from the toxicological and chemical perspective. Biopreservation is not considered as a traditional use, where it has been by design - but forgotten - as the initial goal of fermentation. The 'modern' use of biopreservation is also slightly different from the traditional use, due mainly to changes in cooling of food and other ways of preservation, Extending shelf life is considered to be one of the properties of food additives, classifying - from our perspective - biopreservation wrongly and forgetting the role of fermentation and food cultures. The present review will summarize the current approaches of fermentation as a way to preserve and protect the food, considering the different way in which food cultures and this application could help tackle food waste as an additional control measure to ensure the safety of the food

Regulatory and Safety Requirements for Food Cultures

The increased use of food cultures to ferment perishable raw materials has potentiated the need for regulations to assess and assure the safety of food cultures and their uses. These regulations differ from country to country, all aimed at assuring the safe use of food cultures which has to be guaranteed by the food culture supplier. Here we highlight national differences in regulations and review a list of methods and methodologies to assess the safety of food cultures at strain level, at production, and in the final product

Food fermentations: microorganisms with technological beneficial use

The publisher and the author regret that in the recent publication of the above article the supplementary material accompanying the article contained formatting errors hiding some of the text describing the food usage for the following species: Galactomyces candidum, Geotrichum candidum, Pichia kudriavzevii, and Pichia fermentans. The corrected supplementary data is now available online. Erratum, volume 156, issue 3, page 301, doi: 10.1016/j.ijfoodmicro.2012.04.003Microbial food cultures have directly or indirectly come under various regulatory frameworks in the course of the last decades. Several of those regulatory frameworks put emphasis on "the history of use", "traditional food", or "general recognition of safety". Authoritative lists of microorganisms with a documented use in food have therefore come into high demand. One such list was published in 2002 as a result of a joint project between the International Dairy Federation (IDF) and the European Food and Feed Cultures Association (EFFCA). The "2002 IDF inventory" has become a de facto reference for food cultures in practical use. However, as the focus mainly was on commercially available dairy cultures, there was an unmet need for a list with a wider scope. We present an updated inventory of microorganisms used in food fermentations covering a wide range of food matrices (dairy, meat, fish, vegetables, legumes, cereals, beverages, and vinegar). We have also reviewed and updated the taxonomy of the microorganisms used in food fermentations in order to bring the taxonomy in agreement with the current standing in nomenclature