Strangeness production in a constituent quark model

We develop a model to calculate strangeness production in both elementary and heavy ion collisions, within the framework of a statistical approach to hadronisation. Calculations are based on the canonical partition function of the thermal Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model with exact conservation of flavor and color. It turns out that the growth of strange quarks production in heavy ion collisions is due to the initial excess of non-strange matter over antimatter, whereas a suppression occurs for elementary collisions, owing to the constraint of exact quantum charges conservation over small volumes.