39E-4

Y. ZHAO, Department of Nutritional Sciences, University of Connecticut, 3624 Horsebarn Rd., Extension U-17, Storrs, CT 06269 and J. H. Wells, Food Innovation Center, Oregon State University, 1207 N.W. Naito Pkwy, Suite 154, Portland, OR 97209.

Prediction of quality and shelf-life of perishable food under various storage and distribution conditions would help industrial processors understand the influence of operation parameters, and thus help them improve their product quality and shelf life. Using digital technology, the truly interactive food quality and shelf-life models could be implemented on the internet for allowing users access at anytime and anywhere.

The objective of this work was to use current technologies to publish "live" demonstration food quality and shelf-life models on the internet.

The program module was integrated with previous developed models to fully demonstrate the influence of temperature and other parameters on quality and shelf-life of various perishable foods. Two commercial Java-development packages, SmartTable Pro^TM and DataVista^TM Pro, were used to convert Excel spreadsheet objectives and chart elements into Java applets. Additional Java codes were created to add communications between charting and spreadsheet objectives, and to bind chart elements to spreadsheet objectives.

The result is an interactive implementation of an Excel spreadsheet that describes quality and shelf-life under user defined storage conditions. Simulation results are shown on the screen immediately, along with a coordinate plot of the spreadsheet table. The program allows users to select storage temperature and time online. Input from client computer is sent to a host server for calculation. Shelf-life data of selected product in the spreadsheet table will change accordingly, upgrading the charts automatically.

The program is intended to be used as an instructional aid in demonstrating changes in food quality and shelf-life under certain storage conditions. Besides its application to food quality and shelf-life demonstration models, the software development approach could be applied to other on-line model demonstration that can be described in an Excel spreadsheet.