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Rapidly heating milk for less than a second can eliminate most of the bacteria left behind after the pasteurization process and extend the shelf life of cold milk by several weeks:
Bruce Applegate, Purdue associate professor in the Department of Food Science, and collaborators from Purdue and the University of Tennessee published their findings in the journal SpringerPlus, where they show that increasing the temperature of milk by 10 degrees for less than a second eliminates more than 99 percent of the bacteria left behind after pasteurization. "It's an add-on to pasteurization, but it can add shelf life of up to five, six or seven weeks to cold milk," Applegate said.
[...] The low-temperature, short-time (LTST) method in the Purdue study sprayed tiny droplets of pasteurized milk, which was inoculated with Lactobacillus and Pseudomonas bacteria, through a heated, pressurized chamber, rapidly raising and lowering their temperatures about 10 degrees Celsius but still below the 70-degree Celsius threshold needed for pasteurization. The treatment lowered bacterial levels below detection limits, and extended shelf life to up to 63 days. "With the treatment, you're taking out almost everything," Applegate said. "Whatever does survive is at such a low level that it takes much longer for it to multiply to a point at which it damages the quality of the milk."
The LTST chamber technology was developed by Millisecond Technologies, a New-York-based company. Sensory tests compared pasteurized milk with milk that had been pasteurized and run through MST's process. Panelists did not detect differences in color, aroma, taste or aftertaste between the products.
The effect of a novel low temperature-short time (LTST) process to extend the shelf-life of fluid milk (open, DOI: 10.1186/s40064-016-2250-1)
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Sunday August 07 2016, @08:54AM
Anything that allows supermarkets (or middleman suppliers) to stockpile 'fresh' milk will make it difficult for the smallest farmers to compete. If the choice for the supermarket is to buy fresh milk from the small farmer at x+delta, or treated milk at x from the stockpile, then it makes it difficult for the small farmer to charge over the base cost of the largest farmers. You might not care, as agriculture is a business, but lack of smaller farms depopulates rural areas, and you might have an opinion on that.
Certain places are reverting to scrubland as no-one can farm them economically any more. This may or may not be a good thing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 07 2016, @11:12AM
The whole agricultural sector is ill... pretty bad... not only from a biological point of view, but also from an economical point of view. Here in Europe the milk quotum was released two years ago and since a year the price has dropped half. Now the sector needs financial injections (subsidies) to survive. Not only the dairy farming is ill. Agriculture here in the Netherlands had a major blow with a hail storm a few weeks ago, destroying more or less all produce for the year. In the store I noticed last week there were no Dutch apples... all, except one from France, were from Chile or New Zealand.
Banks have proposed changes for the agricultural sector, but IMHO, they are the wrong changes. You need a whole restructuring of the sector (change the fundamental way of how things are done) to overcome these problems.