Producers of pre-cooked meals must ensure correct sterilisation has occurred during the cooking processes.
Recently, a rice miller and food processor installed a new production line that produces various cooked rice based products in re-heatable and microwavable polymer sachets.
As a consequence, the company required a system to monitor the retort cooking and sterilisation temperatures, as well as the accumulated F0, during production of various pouched rice products. The capability to download the results was required for analysis and quality purposes.
Datataker's DT800 data logger was installed and configured for 12 thermocouple probes to monitor the progress of cooking temperatures in the sachets and to monitor the development of steam sterilization as measured by F0.
The probes are placed centrally into pouches, which in turn are placed at appropriate locations throughout the load in a retort.
During the cooking process, the temperature of each probe is recorded every 30 seconds and charted in real time on a computer screen. The partial F0 for each probe is calculated every 30 seconds and a progressive F0 for each probe is accumulated and displayed on a computer screen.
The real time data is returned to a computer running dataTaker software displaying a trend graph of the temperatures, and a numeric display of the progressive F0 accumulations.
The DT800 data logger also logs the temperature and progressive F0 data into memory, which then can be unloaded from the logger following the monitoring period for subsequent analysis in Microsoft Excel, etc.
At the end of the cook time the information is downloaded and retained for analysis and quality purposes.