Development and validation of growth models using one-step modelling approach for determination of chicken meat shelf-life under isothermal and non-isothermal storage conditions

The main objective of the present study was to investigate and simulate the effect of storage temperature on spoilage of aerobically stored chicken meat using two-step and one-step modelling approaches. For this purpose, the fitting capability of various primary models was evaluated for total bacterial counts in aerobically stored chicken meat. The one-step modelling approach considerably improved the fitting capability whichever primary model was used. The statistical indices (bias factor = 0.999 and accuracy factor = 1.194) showed that the best prediction performance for prediction of maximum specific bacterial growth rate values was obtained by the one-step modelling approach involving the Huang model. The prediction performance of the Huang model was also assessed for various non-isothermal storage conditions, and this model provided satisfactory statistical indices (1.027 > bias factor > 1.064 and 1.069 > accuracy factor > 1.085). The validated one-step modelling approach exhibited good performance as a prediction tool for the determination of chicken meat spoilage; therefore the chicken meat shelf-life was predicted as a function of storage temperature. The shelf-life decreased from 58 h (2.4 days) to 16 h (0.7 days) when the storage temperature was increased from 4 °C to 15 °C.