The Less The Shelf Life, The Longer The Life


All we work in confectionery and bakery industry. It’s the way we are earning our lives. That is true, but when it comes to prolonging the lives of the products over the shelf without any conditional protection like cold treatment or vacuum, the real life feels unsecure himself because of the consevatives put in the products to keep the microorganisms away from it or keep them dead.

Our industry is growing wildly, with less possible attention. Products are edible during four, six or more months in the shelves. Isn’t there a better way to shorten the shelf lives everday, to establish faster distribuiton nets. And the nets! How long they must be? Producing a cake in Italy and exporting to India is possible now, and probably there is good market too. Should it be this way? Should a cake or a wafer or a biscuit must spend days and weeks over a ship to arrive at consumption point. Or manufacturing food product might be more localized day by day.

Pastry shops might get a little bigger and more automated to be able to serve to closer region, and distribution nets might get shorter to assure less time loss over the trucks. Currently the longer shelf lives make the producer confident about selling the product some how. This seems much more far from the possible evolution of market ? factory syncronization.

A method must be possible to measure the occupancy levels of the shelves or the consumption rate of product to inform the factory production site simultaneusly to assure a balance between the production and the consumption. This may help to have less possible recycling in the food industry too.

Having longer shelf lives by adding conservatives migth seem easier and simpler and more secure for the production but if we don’t focus on the tough but healty solutions we will never be avare of its easiness.

We need to think again and again and again about massive production of foods…