Quality decay kinetics of semi-preserved sauce as affected by packaging

Semi-preserved tomato sauces packaged in polymeric containers have gained in popularity and market share, as opposed to traditional fully preserved tomato sauces. As a consequence of the different technologies applied, microbiological, enzymatic, and chemical problems are considered and compared with those related to traditional processing. This research represents a comparative study of the influence of different packaging (glass, polyethylene terephtalate [PET], PET added with an oxygen scavenger, and polypropylene [PPD]) on the quality decay kinetics of a semi-preserved sauce. Results suggest that the packages chosen for our experiments can be used interchangeably because of the scant influence of the packaging materials on most of the quality indices. Two exceptions are represented by lycopene content (whose decrease was faster in PET and PP than in glass and PET containing the oxygen scavenger) and the peroxide data (which reached the highest values for PET containers).