Energy and quality performance assessment of emerging and conventional food preservation technologies

Abstract

This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) The energy performance of emerging food pasteurisation technologies (high pressure processing, microwave volumetric heating, ohmic heating) are evaluated to establish whether they can offer significant reductions in energy consumption and overall carbon emissions, relative to conventional processes, while delivering equivalent microbiological lethality, nutritional and organoleptic quality under commercially-representative processing conditions. Product quality (vitamin C and flavour compounds) data have been collected using established analytical and instrumental methods to benchmark achievable product quality improvements. The results show that for maintaining the raw product quality, the emerging electro-technologies are more energy- and primary resource-efficient, subject to identified operating parameters.