Authors: József Farkas, Csilla Mohácsiné Farkas

1. Summary
After a brief recalling of the mathematical scaling of food preservation of nearly one hundred years ago, the article gives a short overview of the international development of predictive bacteriology, highlighting the role of a Hungarian mathematician working in England, József Baranyi, and software packages representing the tertiary models of predictive microbiology. Modeling of the propagation of molds and the formation of mycotoxins is also discussed in the paper. Attention is also drawn to microbiological risk assessment based on the use of predictive modeling, and further research tasks of the topic.
2. Introduction, history
Predictive microbiological modeling had only become a new subdiscipline of food microbiology by the last decades of the 20th century, although it was a mathematical model – the recognition of the logarithmic law of the thermal death of Clostridium botulinum spores in the 1920s – that made scaling of the heat treatment preservation technology of close to neutral pH foods possible [1], [2], [3]. However, similar modeling of the propagation of microbial populations had taken decades, because „predictive microbiology” of bacterial propagation only began in the 1980s when conditions for this were established by the development of computer science and information technology, and thanks to the development of the appropriate software.
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