Innovative Cold Storage Technologies in Food Supply Chain
A special issue of Foods (ISSN 2304-8158). This special issue belongs to the section "Food Engineering and Technology".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (20 February 2022) | Viewed by 13373
Special Issue Editors
Interests: food process control; emerging food processing technologies; biosensing and nano-engineered surfaces for extremely low microbial adhesivity; numerical modeling for thermal or microbial phenomena
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: agricultural product processing; food engineering; ohmic heating; microwave heating; radio frequency heating
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Perishable foods need adequate temperature-controlled environments during the production, storage, transportation, and sales processes to ensure food quality and reduce food losses. This circumstance is generally referred to as “cold chain logistics”. In a cold chain, the shelf life, quality, and safety of perishable foods throughout the supply chain are greatly impacted by environmental factors, especially temperature. Cold storage is the most popular method to preserve highly perishable foods. However, at refrigeration temperatures, the shelf life of these foods is limited, and spoilage leads to massive food waste. Moreover, freezing significantly affects the food’s properties. Ice crystallization and growth during freezing will cause irreversible textural damage to the food through volumetric expansion, moisture migration by induced osmotic pressure gradients, and freeze concentration of solutes leading to protein denaturation. Although freezing would preserve perishable foods for months, these disruptive changes decrease consumers' perception of food quality. Therefore, the development and testing of new and improved cold storage technologies is a worthwhile pursuit.
Emerging freezing technologies have been introduced to markets and slowly replaced conventional freezing since it became more crucial to control the nucleation temperature and suppress ice crystals in food matrices. Supercooling is unique since it is a process of lowering the temperature of a food material below its equilibrium freezing point without the formation of ice crystals. There has been continuous interest in applications of the supercooling technology for food preservation since it promises an extended shelf-life while avoiding ice crystal formation and maintaining fresh textural integrity. This special issue is aimed to browse state-of-the-art technologies to enhance food quality by implementing the control of ice crystal sizes and suppressed ice nucleation.
Keywords
- supercooling
- food preservation
- controlled ice nucleation
- food cold chain
- innovative freezing
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