Guidelines on reporting treatment conditions for emerging technologies in food processing

Abstract

In the last decades, different non-thermal and thermal technologies have been developed for food processing. However, in many cases, it is not clear which experimental parameters must be reported to guarantee the experiments' reproducibility and provide the food industry a straightforward way to scale-up these technologies. Since reproducibility is one of the most important science features, the current work aims to improve the reproducibility of studies on emerging technologies for food processing by providing guidelines on reporting treatment conditions of thermal and non-thermal technologies. Infrared heating, microwave heating, ohmic heating and radiofrequency heating are addressed as advanced thermal technologies and isostatic high pressure, ultra-high-pressure homogenization sterilization, high-pressure homogenization, microfluidization, irradiation, plasma technologies, power ultrasound, pressure change technology, pulsed electric fields, pulsed light and supercritical CO₂ are approached as non-thermal technologies. Finally, growing points and perspectives are highlighted.

Keywords: Advanced thermal technologies; dosimetry; non-thermal technologies; reproducibility; scaling-up.