Food cooking or reheating instructions

Ensure that your back-of-pack cooking instructions deliver safe and good quality products by using our customer cooking verification and related services.

Many products, often classed as ready-to-cook or ready-to-heat, are totally reliant the on consumer cooking to make them safe for consumption. It is therefore vital that back-of-pack cooking instructions are generated using a method that accounts for variation in appliance performance and heating method.

Getting this wrong could result in consumers routinely undercooking products at home and putting themselves at risk! The BRCGS outline an expectation for fully validated instructions, as well as this being a requirement in most retailers’ codes of practices.

There’s a whole lot more on offer alongside cooking instruction verification – including our new 'cooking energy and cost rating’ service. Get in touch to book instruction trials or explore other instruction services.

Cooking instruction verification and generation services

Our procedures for cooking instruction verification have been developed over 30 years to ensure accurate results which account for appliance variations. This core service was established from knowledge gained in research projects developed by Greg Hooper, and Greg’s knowledge and expertise still forms the backbone of our cooking instruction service offering.

For further details on what would be included within a typical instruction verification/generation trial, see our cooking instruction verification and generation services.

More cooking instruction services

Our technical experts have unrivalled experience and knowledge and there’s a whole lot more on offer alongside cooking instruction verification. Our services include:

• Defrosting generation/verification.
• Fibreoptic thermometry to measure time and temperature profiles within a microwave.
• Thermal imaging to access heating patterns and measure maximum product/packaging temperatures.
• Abuse Testing – put your products to the test and see what issues you are challenged with? How do your products stand up to the variability of appliances?
• Thermal Safety – is there a high risk of thermal injury to the consumer? Can packaging withstand the required heating time? What happens if a product is heated beyond its recommended cook time?
• Practical safety of heating products for sensory only purposes.
• Cook loss data.
• Trouble shooting and problem solving – the cooking instruction used by consumers is the last step before products are eaten and getting it right is critical. Success or failure of a product depends on this step and even slight tweaks of the instruction can have a huge different on the cooked quality of a product.

Air fryers

The variation in cooking performance between different brands and designs of these popular cooking appliances makes cooking instruction verification a challenge. See our dedicated page for details of air fryer services, research and blogs.

Cooking energy and cost rating

We now offer an exciting new service where energy usage and cost are measured in conjunction with the instruction verification/generation trial. We expect that a move to better inform consumers of the cost of cooking (through back-of-pack or website, for example) will be of considerable benefit to consumers, which will in turn benefit the manufacturers and retailers who provide this information.

Equipment and techniques

We use a range of calibrated equipment to encompass all reasonable worst-case scenarios, including domestic thermal ovens (gas electric and fan-assisted), air fryers, over 50 different microwaves etc. and different temperature measurement techniques to ensure accurate product temperature data during and after cooking.