the handbook of food engineering practice crc press chapter 10 ...

end of shelf life is within less than 20% conversion, for practical purposes either model is
sufficient.
Figure 1. Loss of food quality as a function of time, showing difference
between zero and first- order reaction.
Additionally, the worse the precision of the method of measuring the quality factor
A the larger the extent of change to which the experiment should be carried out to obtain
an acceptably accurate estimate of the reaction rate constant as illustrated in Figure 2. It
should be noted here that most measurements in complex foods involve typically an error
of 5% or worse.
Erroneous results are often obtained this way, especially if the data are used to
extrapolate to longer times. Unfortunately, this has often occurred in the literature. Studies
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