Refrigeration Applied to food; recent innovations

Abstract

Food is a fragile resource and refrigeration and cold chain plays a key role in food preservation. An overview of selected technologies, are presented in this paper. Freezing addresses different issues in particular in terms of energy demand; based on the consideration of the international institute of refrigeration, recommendation can be proposed resulting in substantial energy savings. A focus is then proposed on recently developed technologies; superchilling applied to seafood, high pressure processing and freezing under static electric field (electro-freezing). Superchilling consists of preserving products at temperature close to the initial freezing temperature; such a strategy permits reduction of water activity and potentially leads to extension of shelf life. High pressure processing can be used to freeze products and also to process seafood. High quality frozen foods can be obtained with pressure shift freezing process with refined ice crystallization. More recently, freezing under electric field has been developed and applied to meat and seafood; recent results demonstrate the advantages of electro-freezing in terms of ice crystals microstructure.