It was invented by French scientist Louis Pasteur during the nineteenth century. In 1864 Pasteur discovered that heating beer and wine was enough to kill most of the bacteria that caused spoilage, preventing these beverages from turning sour. The process achieves this by eliminating pathogenic microbes and lowering microbial numbers to prolong the quality of the beverage. Today, pasteurization is used widely in the dairy industry and other food processing industries to achieve food preservation and food safety. It is not intended to kill microbes but reduces to number of pathogens to causes illness.
