Food preservation involves different food processing steps to maintain food quality at a desired level so that maximum benefits and nutrition values can be achieved. Food preservation methods include growing, harvesting, processing, packaging, and distribution of foods. The key objectives of food preservation are to overcome inappropriate planning in agriculture, to produce value-added products, and to provide variation in diet. Food spoilage could be caused by a wide range of chemical and biochemical reactions. To impede chemical and microbial deterioration of foods, conventional and primitive techniques of preserving foods like drying, chilling, freezing, and pasteurization have been fostered. In recent years, the techniques to combat these spoilages are becoming sophisticated and have gradually altered to a highly interdisciplinary science. Highly advanced technologies like irradiation, high-pressure technology, and hurdle technology are used to preserve food items. This review article presents and discusses the mechanisms, application conditions, and advantages and disadvantages of different food preservation techniques. This article also presents different food categories and elucidates different physical, chemical, and microbial factors responsible for food spoilage. Furthermore, the market economy of preserved and processed foods has been analyzed in this article.

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A review on mechanisms and commercial aspects of food preservation and processing

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the design of novel nonthermal processing systems that minimally modify sensory, nutritional, and functional properties of fruit and vegetable juices and beverages. The benefits of nonthermal treatments are strongly dependent on the food matrix. Thus, an understanding of the effects that these technologies exert on the properties of juices and beverages is important to design and optimize technological parameters to produce value-added products. This review covers research on nonthermal electrical treatments, high pressure processing, ultrasound, radiation processing, inert gas treatments, cold plasma, and membrane processing. Advances towards optimization of processing conditions, and combined technologies approaches have been also extensively reviewed. This information could be useful to: (1) manage processing systems and optimize resources; (2) preserve nutritional value and organoleptic properties, and (3) provide processing conditions for validation of these technologies at the industrial scale.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1541-4337.12299

Nonthermal Technologies for Fruit and Vegetable Juices and Beverages: Overview and Advances.

Background The food industry is heavily dependent on fossil fuels and significantly contributes to GHG emissions. The global population is also growing and food demand is expected to increase a 60% by 2050. To combat environmental pollution and create a more sustainable food sector, energy use during manufacturing needs to be reduced. Scope and approach To gain a better understanding of the energy employed in manufacturing and distribution of foods - within the UK and globally - energy usage within the food industry has been collected from literature and clustered by product, processing technique and transportation method. Key findings and conclusions Energy figures show that instant coffee, milk powder, French fries, crisps and bread are among the most energy intensive food products. The thermal processes involved in their manufacturing consumed large proportions of the total processing energy. In the meat and dairy processing sectors, energy and water use have increased due to a rise in hygienic standards and cleaning requirements. Additionally, meat products are processed - and sometime over processed - to a higher degree for consumer convenience, all this increasing the associated energy usage for manufacture. Regarding food transportation, more than 98% of all foods within the UK are transported by road, and the distances travelled have increased in recent years. Tertiary distribution using rigid vehicles was the most energy intensive transportation method, while primary distribution at ambient temperature was the least. Refrigerated transportation, which is more intensive than stationary refrigerated systems, has also increased during the past years.

https://research.birmingham.ac.uk/portal/files/58789635/1_s2.0_S0924224417303394_main.pdf

Mapping energy consumption in food manufacturing

Background The fruit and vegetable sector generates large amounts of waste. In industrialized countries, fruit and vegetable waste (FVW) is mainly generated before reaching consumers, due to programmed overproduction and unfulfillment of retailer quality standards. FVW poses environmental problems due to its high biodegradability, represents a loss of valuable biomass and an economic cost for companies. Different reduction, reuse and recycle strategies to tackle FVW have been proposed. Scope and approach This review paper summarizes these strategies, underlying their main advantages and pitfalls. In particular, fresh-cut salad waste was considered as a particularly challenging FVW, due to its low concentration of nutrients (e.g. polyphenols, pigments, fiber). Key findings and conclusions Different management strategies can be successfully applied to FVW. Among them, the extraction of specific functional compounds was found to be one of the most studied in the last years. This suggests that FVW can be considered a source of valuable ingredients and products. To maximally exploit these FVW potentialities, a rational strategy is required. The latter should be developed using a step-procedure including waste characterization, output definition, process design and feasibility study. The application of this procedure to the case of fresh-cut salad waste was presented. Based on the review of currently applied and potential salad waste management strategies, an operational scheme for the development of alternative strategies was proposed. This scheme considers the exploitation of traditional and novel technologies, even applied in combination, for salad waste valorization.

Fruit and vegetable waste management and the challenge of fresh-cut salad

Innovative food processing technologies have been widely investigated in food processing research in recent years. These technologies offer key advantages for advancing the preservation and quality of conventional foods, for combatting the growing challenges posed by globalization, increased competitive pressures and diverse consumer demands. However, there is a need to increase the level of adoption of novel technologies to ensure the potential benefits of these technologies are exploited more by the food industry. This review outlines emerging thermal and non-thermal food processing technologies with regard to their mechanisms, applications and commercial aspects. The level of adoption of novel food processing technologies by the food industry is outlined and the factors that impact their industrial adoption are discussed. At an industry level, the technological capabilities of individual companies, their size, market share as well as their absorptive capacity impact adoption of a novel technology. Characteristics of the technology itself such as costs involved in its development and commercialization, associated risks and relative advantage, and level of complexity and compatibility influence the technology's adoption. The review concludes that a deep understanding of the development and application of a technology along with the factors influencing its acceptance are critical to ensure its commercial adoption.

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Emerging food processing technologies and factors impacting their industrial adoption

Fresh juices are highly popular beverages in the global food market. They are perceived as wholesome, nutritious, all-day beverages. For a fast growing category of premium juice products such as cold-pressed juices, minimal-processing nonthermal techniques such as ultraviolet (UV) light and high-pressure processing (HPP) are expected to be used to extend shelf-life while retaining physicochemical, nutritional, and sensory characteristics with reduced microbial loads. Also, UV light and HPP are approved by regulatory agencies and recognized as one of the simplest and very environmentally friendly ways to destroy pathogenic organisms. One of the limitations to their more extensive commercial application lies in the lack of comparative effects on nutritional and quality-related compounds in juice products. This review provides a comparative analysis using 92 studies (UV light: 42, HPP: 50) mostly published between 2004 and 2015 to evaluate the effects of reported UV light and HPP processing conditions on the residual content or activity of bioactive compounds such as vitamins, polyphenols, antioxidants, and oxidative enzymes in 45 different fresh fruit and vegetable juices (low-acid, acid, and high-acid categories). Also, the effects of UV light and HPP on color and sensory characteristics of juices are summarized and discussed.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1541-4337.12214

Anthony Popielarz

Papers

Effects of Ultraviolet Light and High‐Pressure Processing on Quality and Health‐Related Constituents of Fresh Juice Products