Avoiding Premature Water Activity Testing Results When Meeting Safety Regulations

May 17, 2022 (12:00 PM -1:00 PM Eastern Time)

Webinar Description

Organized by: Low Water Activity Foods PDG

Government, risk-based product safety programs require water activity testing monitoring to mitigate risk, and these results must be reliable. Consequently, water activity testing methods need to be verified, meet the requirements of standard methods, and represent true equilibrium values. Water activity testing requires a vapor equilibration step that cannot be artificially sped up and fast water activity results are likely not meeting this requirement of vapor equilibrium. To illustrate the potential problems of premature results, several common food products were tested continuously in several manufacturer’s water activity instruments. The results indicate that less stringent end-of-test requirements did produce premature results that were different by as much as 0.03 aw than the final equilibrium results. This webinar will discuss the requirements of common water activity standard methods and the danger of failing audits when relying on premature water activity values.

Learning Objectives:
•An overview of the role of water activity testing in meeting government regulations
•The requirements for water activity testing to meet standard methods and government regulations
•Why fast water activity results may be premature and not fully reliable
•The importance of understanding the impact of end-of-test settings
•Best practices for optimizing test time while still obtaining reliable results