Non-thermal innovations in solid food processing: Eco-friendly alternatives to thermal methods

Preservation of food products in distribution chain for a long time while maintaining their quality is a main issue due to decrease food wastes. Conventional thermal methods, which commonly are used, can effectively inactive microorganisms and therefore prolong shelf life of foods but energy consumption of these methods is usually high and therefore cause some minus effects on processed food products like degradation of nutrients and undesirable sensory changes. Therefore, demand for technologies which can processes food products minimally while can maintain food quality and increase their shelf life has attracted so attentions in food industry. This motivation introduced non-thermal technologies such as high-pressure processing (HPP), pulsed electric field (PEF), cold plasma (CP), ultrasound (US) and irradiation (IR) in processing of food-to-food industry. All of these technologies have their specific conditions, equipment and effective parameters which determine their efficacy. Although these technologies can play important roles in decreasing contamination of foods, maintain quality and increase shelf life of food but their utilization in large-scale is limited due to high cost of their equipment, regulation challenges and consumer acceptance. This review introduces some of the advantages and limitations of these non-thermal methods which are utilized on some large groups of solid foods in human diet (dairy, meat and poultry, seafood, fruits and vegetables). Finally, some suggestion for future studies can be refining process parameters, improving consumer awareness and integrated multi-technique implementation for greater efficiency in food quality.