Bojana B. Prodanic, Aleksandar I. Jokic, Jelena Đ. Markovic and Zoltan Z. Zavargo General trend of free trade at the regional level as well as in the direction of European Union has motivated sugar factories located in Serbia to invest into technologies that are more efficient in order to make their products more competitive in the markets of Europe. Until 2005, the project of energy efficiency improvement in Serbian sugar factories was conducted in Crvenka and Žabalj. Now, they have energy consumption around 1 MJ/kg beet, in contrast to the previous consumption of 1.2 up to 1.5 MJ/kg beet. Further improvements are possible but investments would be high. A result of measurements taken during 2006, after the sugar factory „Donji Srem“ - Pecinci was reconstructed showed that a considerable saving has been achieved. The first set of measurements showed that the energy consumption was 1.01 MJ/kg beet, which was 20% higher than intended, but at the same time energy savings were about 30% lower with respect to the values before the reconstruction.

In this research the microbiological changes during the ripening of fermented horsemeat sausages were studied. Three sausages were sampled on day 0, 14, 28 and 42. Microbiological analysis included the determination of counts of aerobic mesophilic bacteria, lactic acid bacteria, micrococci, Staphylococcus aureus, enterobacteria, Escherichia coli, yeasts and moulds, enterococci, Pseudomonas spp, sulphite-reducing clostridia, and identification of the presence of Listeria monocytogenes and Salmonella species. During fermentation, in the sausage microflora prevailed LAB (6-8 log10 cfu g-1), but there were also micrococci (2-3 log10 cfu g-1), and yeasts and fungi (3-4 log10 cfu g-1). Significant drop in pH value was recorded during the first 14 days of fermentation (5.82 on day 0, and 5.02 on day 14). That, and other possible antimicrobial mechanisms of LAB, led to the expected reduction of microorganism counts or elimination of enterobacteria, E. coli, pathogenic staphylococci and sulphite-reducing clostridia.