**3. Residential catering**

Institutional food establishments have a key role to public health. Consumers that are generally more likely to suffer from foodborne diseases occupy them, such as children, elderly, sick, or immunocompromised individuals. Their physiological characteristics often require high degree of food safety in the meals served.

According to the European Federation of Contract Catering Organizations (FERCO), approx‐ imately 33% of firms or collective organizations currently have a contract with a Contract Catering company. Indeed, this is a sector that represents an alternative to meet the basic food needs of a group of very important people. Among institutional catering companies stand Eurest SA authorities; Serunión S.A; Sodexho S.A. Spain; and Aramark catering services, SL, among others, that allocate their production mainly to hospitals, nursing geriatric, dining, and study centers.

The fact of preparing and serving large volumes of food in a relatively short-time framework involves the use of new technologies for conservation and/or optimization of existing tech‐ nologies, to ensure the hygienic and sanitary quality and shelf life of food.

Studies related to systems development, maintenance, and transportation of prepared meals cite the refrigerated cold chain, frozen cold chain, hot chain, or vacuum cooking [17]:


Utilization of more traditional food preservation techniques is also common [17] such as industrial pasteurization or chemical preservation (salting, smoking, marinating, and pick‐ ling).

Lastly, other preservation technologies are used to reduce the amount of food handling in the kitchen, such as high hydrostatic pressure, the light pulses, dehydration, irradiation, and modified atmosphere preservation, among others [17–19].
