 |
|
|
|
BROWSE THE
SITE:
|
2002 Articles by Brian Martell: Aging Exceptionally© 2002 Brian Martell The US Army has recently announced a breakthrough in culinary combat — the three year sandwich. Using the latest in oxygen scavenging compounds, environment controlled packaging and specially extruded bread with moisture controlled ingredients, this sandwich will survive up to three years in a non-refrigerated environment. Perhaps the quintessential example of food preservation, this will indeed set a new benchmark for shelf life standards. The real kicker is that the sandwich actually tastes good. On a scale of one to ten, the new MRE ("meal ready to eat" in military lingo) rated a respectable 8. While this may have profound implications for the vending industry, especially for fresh foods, the new technology is not expected to be available commercially for another 3 years. What this does demonstrate, however, is the possibility of preserving the quality of food items well beyond our current thinking of what a good shelf life should be. There are currently new technologies on the market and available to preserve foods and/or make them safer, such as irradiation. Some of these are expensive while others are considered controversial due to the nature of how the food is treated. What remains is the continuing drive to make food fresher and safer longer. Enter coffee, a product that is prone to go stale quickly after roasting, but poses no contextual health risk even if it’s past the prime of good taste. Prior to roasting, green beans can and often do maintain their flavour characteristics for a year or more. It should be noted that not all green coffee ages gracefully. Traditionally, roasters were local to their markets because the products could not be packaged adequately to ensure freshness for more than a week or two. With the advent of better packaging materials and nitrogen flushing the shelf life of coffee was extended from a couple of weeks to several months. Add to this equation better and faster distribution channels through the transport industry and you have larger roasters able to effectively cover greater territories while not compromising freshness. The key element in the coffee freshness equation is the reduction of oxygen in environmentally controlled packaging. Oxygen is the culpable element in the staling process for coffee, bread, cookies, etc. What is achieved through nitrogen flushing is the purging of air in the coffee bags, thus displacing the 20% ambient oxygen content. As an inert gas, which also comprises close to 79% of the air we breathe, nitrogen makes an excellent preservative agent in packaged food items. What it cannot do is continue to act as a preservative after the packaging has been opened or ruptured (on purpose or otherwise). For this reason, vending operators face a challenge in maintaining fresh tasting coffee out of their machines while leaving several pounds in the hoppers exposed to the open air. For this reason, a fine balance needs to be made between what is a profitable service schedule on a machine and how old the coffee is in the hopper (a function of how much coffee was put in the hopper to begin with). One of the most vicious circles in this scenario is decaf coffee, which doesn’t move as fast as regular because of the perceived or real taste. Because it has been loitering for far too long in the hopper, the decaf will live up to the prophecy of tasting bad, thus reenforcing the perception that it’s not worth selecting. Until the coffee industry comes up with a way of keeping coffee fresh outside the bag, OCS and vending operators will have to continue to be judicious on how they treat non fractionally packed coffees and continue to demand that the coffees they get are gas flushed. Questions or comments? Reach Brian at Brian@heritage-coffee.com
|
|
Copyright © 2000-2006 |
