AIMS: To develop a method to calculate and record theoretical microbial survival curves during thermal processing of foods and pharmaceutical products simultaneously with the changing temperature. Moreover, to demonstrate that the method can be used to calculate nonisothermal survival curves, with widely available software such as Microsoft Excel. METHODS AND RESULTS: It has been assumed that the targeted organism's isothermal survival curves are not log linear and hence, the inactivation rate in nonisothermal processes is a function of the momentary temperature and the corresponding survival ratio. This could be expressed by a difference equation, which is an approximation to the continuous rate model. The concept was tested with the isothermal survival parameters of Clostridium botulinum and Bacillus sporothermodurans spores, and Salmonella enteritidis cells, using different kinds of survival models and under temperature profiles resembling those of commercial processes. As expected, there was an excellent agreement between the curves produced by solving the differential equation of the continuous model and by the incremental method, which has been posted on the web as freeware. CONCLUSIONS: It is possible to calculate nonisothermal survival curves, in real time, with an algorithm that can be written in the language of general purpose software, to follow the inactivation of one or more targeted organisms simultaneously and to simulate microbial survival patterns under existing or planned industrial thermal processes. SIGNIFICANCE AND IMPACT OF THE STUDY: Replacement of the traditional 'F0-value', which requires the log linearity of the organism's isothermal survival curves, by the more realistic theoretical survival ratio estimate as a measure of the thermal process efficacy.