Some years ago, I had been called for a work mission in the Abruzzo for an Italian food processing company. During my stay a few days, I learned that local companies sometimes buy olives in Morocco, achieve transformation with an easily accessible technology and re-export the olives on the American market at more affordable prices than equivalent items shipped directly from Morocco. The easy to reach “process” mentioned relates to preparation that Anglo-Saxons call “Pickles”. The process requires acidification of vegetables, giving flavor close to vinegar, more palatable to consumer, with a technology that reduces the cost of industrial production and stopping at the same time the spread of germs. This article throws light on the characteristics and value of preserved products by this type of technology, and others, easy to reach and efficient.
Importance of preserved vegetables
In today’s life, where everyone is required to do more, faster, the preserved foods are often unavoidable. Their prices are affordable and, most importantly, reduce preparation time, especially in the case of vegetables. But the germs must be removed from preserves, what represents the basic work of food preservation. Traditionally, these foods are put into an autoclave and sterilized according to a scheduled process so to destroy microbes that all of fresh foods may harbor in quantities that vary. The Autoclaves are however expensive, energy intensive which significantly increases the cost of sterilized foods. But in a world increasingly competitive, the production of safe food is a necessary prerequisite while its successful marketing remains dependent on its selling price that must be as low as possible. For this reason, the production of canned food moves more and more towards energy-efficient technologies in order to better preserve the nutritional value of products and allow of cheaper mass production. The acidified products, which are good examples of such technologies, can remain stable and safe to eat for several years.
Sterilization VS Acidification
To destroy all germs in a fresh food, which pose a risk to the health of the consumer, that is to say the micro-organisms that thrive and those that are inert (spores), you must put the product in question in an Autoclave with application of a suitable sterilization method (temperature above 100 ° C /212 °F under high pressure) for a given time interval. This approach is costly in energy and price of the canned vegetable gets higher. If now, process operations carried out on the fresh food are clean and hygienic and afterwards you add a required amount of an acid food (like lemon juice, for example) that give it a vinegary taste, the micro-organisms that are still there cannot reproduce and the “acidified product” (preserved) will be good to eat . If in addition the product is placed in a sealed jar and then heated (temperature below 100 ° C) in a water bath at ambient pressure (low power consumption), the preserved food can stay and be consumed for several years without problems. The important thing in all this is that the cost of a product made with this technology of acidification may be cheaper by 50 to 80% of the cost of an autoclave product while generally superior in terms of flavor. Here’s how the operators of the Italian food industry, or else in Europe, are able, from the same basic fresh foods that grow on our soil, with a workforce more expensive in their home country, to make preserves of lower cost than we do and sell much more than we in the European and American markets.
Law and technology
The law 28-07, and the ones equivalent in other countries, require the operator to produce safe food but do not mention a process in particular. In fact, there are many technologies and only science rules can delineate the relevance of each one. Industrial knows he must produce a healthy food to comply with the law and also knows that his product must be sold within a range of acceptable prices for the consumer. To deal with these constraints, the operator must make a judicious choice of the most appropriate technology to use. People of the north shore of the Mediterranean have learned better than us to fend on this ground there. Moreover, if suppliers of these countries have the opportunity to up sell to us expensive equipments (eg Autoclaves) and become still more competitive than we are, why would they hesitate to do so?
Some effective and easy to reach technologies
Take for example the case of black olives after maturation. The product can actually be consumed as it is. Now, if the olives are not stored properly, mold can grow on the product and cause unpleasant diarrhea. A trick used on the other side of the Mediterranean is to put ripe black olives in the oven (60 °C / 140 °F) for few hours to remove all moisture. The heat on one side, lack of water (required for the growth of microbes) on the other hand brings the germs activity on the fresh olives to a halt. Now, if you coat the olives with a thin layer of olive oil and vacuum packing them, you have got a product (costing price just slightly above raw material) that can be marketed with Shelf-life of more than a year and is delicious to eat. Similarly, some of our regions are full of mushrooms, such as Boletus, sold (dried) up to several hundred dollars per kilo on external markets. But contrary to what one might imagine, drying is not just letting the sun on the product; otherwise the food is emptied of much of its nutritional value and loses any business interest. Instead, a local simple set-up, sheltered from sunlight, slightly ventilated and without excessive moisture, which can be used throughout the year, is a good investment in addition to the mushroom pickers. But is that why we need to import the expertise of all the foreigners who are busy in the mentioned field and let them do lot of money out of our laziness! There are of course many other easy methods available over the Internet, which allow us to make better commercial benefit of our fresh foods in foreign markets. All this to say that by using the right technology to process our fresh products, that we are actually selling for peanuts to the Europeans and other foreign consumers, we will be able to draw a better profit by making preserves, acidified and others, which can be marketed in accordance with international regulations worldwide.
In conclusion, ONSSA that encourages caterers in cities across Morocco to set associations would do well to extend this experience to benefit our food manufacturers. Better yet, Moroccan processors eager to sell products worldwide have to move towards simple and innovative technologies as mentioned above. Sterilization is probably necessary at times, but our operators should know that wanting to process all their products through the Autoclave, they may wait a long time before becoming competitive.
