Pasteurization treatments of whole and liquid egg products: optimizing safety and quality parameters

Eggs are consumed all over the world as table egg or egg products. The safety of eggs is thus a major concern for both egg industry and consumers, as they may be quite easily contaminated by both pathogenic and/or spoilage bacteria. Despite the natural arsenal of antimicrobial defenses of eggs, the safety of eggs and egg products is nowadays mainly guaranteed by pasteurization treatments. After reminding the principle of pasteurization, the current technologies used for shell eggs, liquid egg products and egg white powders are presented. Their consequences on egg product functionalities and nutritional quality are considered to drive the optimization of the processes toward safe, functional and healthy egg products. The growing issues of the sustainability and environmental impact of the processes are also questioned as the current challenge of egg industry.