Pasteurization is a cost-effective means of reducing bacterial populations in a variety of materials and has been applied in the food industry, biotechnology, and wastewater treatment. One of the major advances in pasteurization has been the development of inline pasteurization units which enable industries to continuously treat a liquid. With any procedure and its associated equipment, responsible individuals must understand the process and be able to modify procedures as conditions change. This ability to think through problems associated with a process critically is difficult to teach without a hands-on opportunity to use the equipment. The newly acquired equipment, a benchtop pasteurizer with data logging capacity, duplicates industrial processes and permits students to design and conduct experiments that address the complex issues related to the pasteurization process. To accomplish this, students in the Food, Dairy, and Industrial Microbiology course are assigned a problem to solve that relates to pasteurization. The solution requires that the students define the parameters to examine, conduct experiments on the pasteurizer to evaluate possible solutions, assess the data collected, and determine the best solution to their problem.
