High hydrostatic pressure: Can we trust published data?

There are numerous new technologies whose implementation in food industry is hampered by the fact that people hesitate to invest in expensive systems which they cannot be sure will work or at least are questionable in terms of a given product. Until recently, preservation by HHP, high hydrostatic pressure, was such a technology, and still is today in some branches of the food industry. Investigations were conducted to answer the question of whether the literature, the laboratory, and the industrial (or at least pilot plant) measurements and results agree with one another. We compared the literature data with two HHP systems which were significantly different in terms of treatment capacity, but their efficiency in killing microbes was studied under the same treatment parameters. Our results show that in nearly all cases only minimal differences exist between the data in the literature and the measurements taken on the two appliances.