The life of a ready meal starts with cooling after cooking. Cooked product is more vulnerable than raw, because cooking removes the natural protective barriers and every hour spent in the warm range gives bacteria time to grow. The Turkish Food Hygiene Regulation (Article 18) requires product to be cooled promptly after heat treatment to a temperature that poses no health risk; the US FDA Food Code 2022 puts numbers on it.
| Cooling step | Maximum time |
|---|---|
| 57 °C to 21 °C | 2 hours |
| 57 °C to 5 °C (total) | 6 hours |
These times are the floor of safe cooling and do not give a retail shelf life. In packed sales life is counted in days and needs a study of the product itself, covering formulation, packaging, atmosphere and cold chain together. In a mixed tray life is limited by its shortest-lived component; packing the components separately can extend the total. The assumption that the meal will be reheated does not enter the shelf-life calculation.
Four records carry the shelf-life discussion: end-of-cooking temperature, time cooling finished, dispatch temperature and delivery temperature. In businesses that work on packaging and formulation to extend life, the largest gain usually sits in the cooling step that was never measured.
