A new approach to predict the fish fillet shelf-life in presence of natural preservative agents

Three data sets concerning the behaviour of spoilage flora of fillets treated with natural preservative substances (NPS) were used to construct a new kind of mathematical predictive model. This model, unlike other ones, allows expressing the antibacterial effect of the NPS separately from the prediction of the growth rate. This approach, based on the introduction of a parameter into the predictive primary model, produced a good fitting of observed data and allowed characterising quantitatively the increase of shelf-life of fillets.