Researching seafood shelf life with industry partners

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research 3:39 Researching seafood shelf life with industry partners

By:

Anthony Wright

4 Aug 2022 385

The Virginia Seafood Agricultural Research and Extension Center provides shelf life research and partnership with Dickie's Seafood.

My name is Katheryn Parraga-Estrada. I am originally from Ecuador and my role is, the Muscle Food Safety Extension Specialist. Today we are in one of the laboratories in the Virginia Seafood AREC, where I conduct shelf life studies, just general quality and safety, microbiological testings, and environmental testings for different companies. This is our first dilution and after they, let's say "dilution zero". So we dilute in decimals. Right now we're plating 0.1 dilution. So I start the analysis from day zero. So I can know how much bacteria it had at day zero and then compare it all the way until ten days later. Usually, the shelf life of fish products will be around 7-8 days, depending on the cold chain management, how good they keep the temperature of that product since it was catched. So that will help to extend the shelf life of the product at the end. We have been working with many companies, Dickie's [Seafood], is one of them. They provided me previous studies that they had in the past and their shelf life was five days. So when they brought me their new product, we found that it is good for seven days actually, so it extended two days which is a lot in the market. And right now we're working with another of their products that is deviled crab, they call it. It is a crab cake. So we're expecting to find more days on the shelf life based on what they had