Seafood Spoilage Predictor—development and distribution of a product specific application software

To allow shelf-life prediction of a range of products, the Seafood Spoilage Predictor (SSP) software has been developed to include both kinetic models for growth of specific spoilage microorganisms and empirical relative rates of spoilage models. SSP can read and evaluate temperature profile data of different formats and in this way the software is a flexible device for electronic time–temperature integration. Predicted values of microbial growth and of remaining product shelf life can be exported from SSP as graphs and tables in ASCII, HTML and eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML) formats and this allows SSP to be used in combination with other programmes. More than 300 people have downloaded SSP and distribution of this software from the internet has been efficient in stimulating the application of predictive microbiology and of mathematical seafood shelf-life models within industry, research, seafood inspection and teaching.