This study provides an important insight into the response of food safety systems during the first months of the pandemic, elevating the perspective of preventing Covid-19 within conventional food safety management systems. A multi-country survey was conducted in 16 countries involving 825 food companies. Based on the results of the survey, it is obvious that the level of maturity of a food safety system in place is the main trigger in classifying companies and their responses to the pandemic challenge. Staff awareness and hygiene are the two most important attributes in combating Covid-19, opposed to temperature checking of workers in food establishment and health protocols from the World Health Organization, recognized as attributes with limited salience and importance. Companies confirmed implementation of more restrictive hygiene procedures during the pandemic and the need for purchasing more additional personal protective equipment. Retailers were identified as the food supply chain link mostly affected by the pandemic opposed to food storage facilities ranked as least affected. During this challenging period, all companies declared that food safety has not been compromised at any moment. It is important to note that less than a half of the food companies had documented any emergency plans associated with pandemics and health issues in place.

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The determination of the amount of non-intact cells (ANIC) in ground beef products is usually performed using a time-consuming and subjective histometric approach neglecting structural properties, which is why more objective and faster methods including evaluation of quality parameters are needed. To determine, whether the addition of meat batter increases the histologically determined ANIC ground beef samples containing increasing shares of meat batter (non-intact cells) were investigated histologically and results were compared to other methodological approaches, namely lactate dehydrogenase activity (LDH), soluble protein content, metmyoglobin content, drip loss, firmness, and cooking loss. Histological measurements showed that ANIC increased linearly with the addition of meat batter to ground beef. The quality parameters drip loss (r = − 0.834, p < 0.01) and firmness (r = − 0.499, p < 0.01), and the structural parameter metmyoglobin content (r = 0.924, p < 0.01) revealed significant correlations with the amount of added meat batter, and detected differences between ground beef samples when the difference in the amount of added batter-like-substance was ≥ 25%. Therefore, those methods might be useful to estimate and extrapolate ANIC, and assess product quality of ground beef samples in a faster and simpler way. The cooking loss was not affected by meat batter addition, whereas LDH activity revealed non-repeatable results. Taken together, histometric methods are useful to measure ANIC, nevertheless, it is limited in terms of characterization of morphological and structural changes in the meat. However, other parameters were correlated and could, in addition, be used for assessing the quality of ground meat.

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Plant-based emulsion gels can be used as solid animal fat substitutes for vegan sausages. For this reason, commercially available protein isolates with different amino acid profiles from pea, soy and potato (Pea-1, Pea-2, Soy, Potato) have been tested for their ability to form shape stable emulsions gels at neutral pH and upon heating to 72 °C. In order to obtain emulsion gels that are as solid as possible, the protein concentrations in the continuous phase (CPC, 8.0–11.5% (w/w)) and the oil mass fractions (65–80%) were varied. For leguminous proteins, a positive correlation of both parameters on emulsion rigidity was shown, indicating that both, interfacial and protein–protein interactions, are involved in structure reinforcement. Firmness increased with increasing content in cysteine (Pea-1 < Pea-2 < Soy) and the interactions were of electrostatic, hydrophobic and hydrophilic nature. Potato emulsion rigidity was independent of CPC and oil content. The emulsions showed a much higher degree in crosslinking, and very low charge density. Temperature-sweep analysis and CLSM revealed that Potato protein gelled as consequence to low temperature stability. Hence, the structure reinforcement in Potato emulsions mainly contributed to the protein network, with 70% oil and CPC 11.5% forming a hybrid gel with highest firmness. However, gelling of Potato protein also resulted in interfacial adsorption of protein aggregates and reduced interfacial stability with increasing CPC. This was demonstrated in the amount of extractable fat which was 2.0 and 0.6% for Pea-1 and 2 emulsions, 6.4% for Soy and 34.4% of total fat for Potato emulsions.

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