These results are in accordance with those previously reported by Quintieri et al. (2012) and Quintieri
et al. (2013b) demonstrating that LFH significantly delayed the growth of the autochthonous pseudomonads and coliforms throughout cold storage of commercial HM Mozzarella cheese samples.
Black colony counts from inoculated GL samples (trial C and D) did not change in the first three days of cold storage (4.30 log cfu/ ml, on average; P 1⁄4 0.825), whereas, starting from day 5, the black colony loads from inoculated LFH-free GL samples were steadily ca. one log cfu/ml higher (P 1⁄4 1 10 13) than those of LFH-treated samples (trial C and D, respectively; Fig. 5, left side). As expected, no black colonies were found in the uninoculated trials A and B.