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Factors Affecting Pet Food Shelf Life

Factors Affecting Pet Food Shelf Life

Product catalog summary

Abstract: The document discusses the importance of maintaining the original flavor and nutrition of pet food during its shelf life, emphasizing the role of packaging in prolonging shelf life amidst competitive market conditions.

Introduction: Pet food must adhere to strict standards similar to human food to ensure safety and health. In the U.S., organizations like AAFCO, USDA, and FTC regulate pet food standards. In countries like China, AAFCO standards are often applied due to the lack of specific local regulations.

Factors Affecting Shelf Life: Key factors include additives, packaging, and the maintenance environment. Artificial preservatives can extend shelf life but may alter taste and pose health risks. Microorganisms thrive in environments with oxygen, water, and suitable temperatures, leading to spoilage.

Packaging Integrity: The integrity of packaging is crucial to prevent oxygen and water vapor from entering. Common packaging types include plastic, laminated, and aluminum-plastic packages. Issues like seal strength and puncture resistance are critical for maintaining package integrity.

Permeability of Packaging Materials: The permeability of packaging materials to gases and water vapor significantly affects shelf life. Tests on various materials show that laminated and aluminum-plastic materials offer better barrier properties, thus extending shelf life.

Solutions: Recommendations for manufacturers include using laminated and aluminum-plastic materials for their superior barrier properties and ensuring good mechanical properties like peel and seal strength to maintain package integrity.

Catalog excerpts

Factors Affecting Pet Food Shelf Life By Yarina Gao, China [Abstract] Same as human being food, pet food conforms to strict standards to ensure the safety of pets. Pet food must keep their original flavor and nutrition during maintenance, transportation and shelf life, which rely heavily on the pet food packages. In the keen competitions, prolonging pet food shelf life attracts more and more manufacturers and suppliers attentions. In this article, I will talk about the factors that affect pet food shelf life and related solutions to prolong shelf life in terms of pet food packaging. [Keywords] Pet Food, Food Packaging, Shelf Life, Affecting Factors, Solutions Pet food has been one of keen competitive industries along with countless new pet foods introduced into the market. Same as human being food, pet food should conform to strict standards to ensure pet safety and health. In America, pet food is supervised by AAFCO (Association of American Feed Control Officials), USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) and FTC (Federal Trade Community). AAFCO establishes the nutritional standards for complete and balanced pet foods, and it is the pet food company's responsibility to formulate and maintain their products according to the appropriate AAFCO standard. In many countries, like China, there aren’t special regulations or standards related to pet food quality control, so they usually also apply to AAFCO standards. Like human being food, pet food also has a certain shelf life. Manufacturers and suppliers must ensure the pet food won’t be stale or lost nutrition during the shelf life. To enhance and keep the competitions, more and more manufacturers are trying to have a full consideration on factors affecting shelf life, in order to prolong their products shelf life Factors Affecting Shelf Life Many factors affect pet food shelf life, like additives (preservatives), packages, maintenance environment (temperature, lights). Maintenance environment, which is the conditions during the pet food delivery and maintenance, is a human factor and can be controlled by us. Preservatives can also affect pet food shelf life. Basically, pet food added with artificial preservatives has as longer as months shelf life than those with natural preservatives. But artificial preservatives can change the original taste of food and perhaps release some toxic substance. Therefore, there are very strict restrictions on preservatives usage. Complying with AAFCO, pet food must have primary nutrition including protein (more than 18%), fat and additional nutrition like amino acids, mineral substance, crude fiber, calcium, iron, vitamins and so on. All these nutrition aims to ensure the necessities of pet growth, living and make their fur sleek. Meanwhile, it also provides a good medium for growth of microorganisms. These

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microorganisms can reduce protein to organic amines and mercaptans, which stink and decay pet food, reduce fat to smelly ketone and aldehyde and other spoilage substance. All these low molecular will not only change the taste of pet food, but also make protein and fact lost their nutrition. Therefore, it is essentially important to restrain microorganisms no matter on production lines or shelves. As we all know, growth and living of microorganisms need proper environment. The most three important factors are temperature, oxygen and water. Oxygen is primary factor that cause food decay. The less...

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plastic films. It should not be too high, which results in worse consumer experiences or too low, which results in packages opening during the transportation or maintenance. II. Permeability of Packaging Materials Permeability is a measure of the ability of a barrier material to allow gases (O2, N2, CO2 and water vapor etc.) to permeate through it in a specific time. It usually depends on the type of material, pressure, temperature and thickness of materials. During pet food shelf life, oxygen and water vapor in the packages should maintain the prefilled volumes, which reply heavily on pet food...

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OTR and WVTR test results of these 7 packaging materials as follow: Table 1 Test Data of Pet Food Packaging Permeability Analyzing the test results of these 7 kinds of packaging materials, we can find that materials laminated with different layers can have a significant difference in oxygen permeability. From Table 1, aluminum-plastic materials, BOPET/VMPET/LDPE, PET/CPP has a relative lower oxygen transmission rate (better oxygen barrier property). According to our research, pet food with these kinds of packaging usually has longer shelf life0 Oxygen Transmission Rate Laminated films have a...

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Water Vapor Transmission Rate According to the tests we conducted in Labthink laboratory, choosing proper packaging for pet food is helpful in prolonging pet food shelf life, decreasing the addition of preservatives, saving production cost as well as pet health. Therefore, we have advices for manufacturers and suppliers of pet food packaging as follows: ■S Choose laminated plastic, aluminum-plastic materials and metal materials as pet food packages, because all these materials have a good barrier properties to oxygen and water vapor. Besides consideration of oxygen and water vapor permeation...

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