Considering that the guidelines for the microbiological safety of pork meat defined a product ‘‘safe’’ if its microbial load is less than 5 Log (CFU/cm2 ) in terms of mesophilic bacteriaand that the raw samples showed a microbial content of about 5 Log (CFU/cm2 ), the pasteurization process was considered acceptable even with a decrease of 2 Log of the initial contamination; for this reason the process condition of 6 MPa, 25 C and 60 min was chosen to perform the colour experiments. In addition, this condition was the mildest among all those tested, thus the one that potentially induced minor changes to the appearance of the sample.