Cold plasma as a frontier in combating foodborne bacterial pathogens in ready-to-eat (RTE) foodstuff

In recent years, the demand for ready-to-eat (RTE) foods has grown considerably as RTE foods are more nutritious as compared to frozen, preserved, and stored food products. However, there is an increased chance of microbial contamination in these foods at numerous stages, which leads to food poisoning, and, in severe cases, fatalities. In the past, various thermal and non-thermal technologies have been discovered to enhance food safety in addition to conventional physical and chemical methods due to health effects and less nutritional losses. Thermal technologies including blanching, pasteurization, and sterilization are widely used to inactivate the microbes. However, these treatments affect the foods' organoleptic, nutritional, and technological characteristics. Consequently, non-thermal technologies such as cold plasma (CP), have emerged as ecologically safe treatments while preserving food quality. The main objective of this review is to explore the effects of CP, alone or in combination on the bacterial pathogenic safety of RTE foods. Besides that, this review also focuses on the possible inactivation mechanism, and challenges associated with this technique, and offers future recommendations. Previous investigations showed that CP significantly reduces the counts of Escherichia coli, Enterobacter aerogenes, Salmonella spp., Listeria spp., Shigella, and Pseudomonas spp. in different RTE foods with minimum loss of nutrients as compared to the heat-treated samples. The results were more favorable (in terms of microbial reduction) when CP was combined with other methods during the processing and storage steps.