Coping with stress, how bacteria respond to food processing

The ability of bacteria to adapt to and overcome the numerous environmental stresses it encounters in food processing are studied. The bacterial response to food processing is crucial to its ability to cause disease and death in an organism. In context to this, the food industry is facing challenges in meeting consumer demands for long shelf-life, food safety, and in food processing. One of the main problems is establishing safe processing parameters that ensure the destruction of food pathogens without destructing nutrition and organoleptic attributes of the food. However, food manufacturers are concentrating on minimizing the use of preservatives and on control measures to protect consumers from microbial diseases.