Cereals & Grains Association
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Useful concepts and tools for defining the shelf-life of your product.
M. SEWALD (1). (1) Medallion Labs/General Mills, Inc, Minneapolis, MN, U.S.A.

Once food safety and regulatory concerns are addressed, defining a ‘best if used date’ for your product becomes a task of understanding sensory quality risk.  To do this effectively and efficiently, there needs to be a business team dialogue regarding quality risk management, and the level of risk accepted by assigning a specific code date.   The basic terms and tools that can be used to facilitate this discussion are addressed in various literature sources.  The challenge for industry is to reduce these concepts to practice in a manner that allows product knowledge to be developed and applied as business needs for this information occur throughout the product life cycle.   New tools for calculating and transmitting information more rapidly, and with greater accuracy and precision, represent just some of the opportunities for the future.

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