A Review of Novel and Innovative Food Freezing Technologies

Abstract

Freezing is a very well-established food preservation process that produces high quality nutritious foods with a long storage life. However, freezing is not suitable for all foods, and freezing can cause physical and chemical changes in some foods that are perceived as reducing the quality of either the thawed material or the final product. This paper reviews the many innovative freezing processes that are currently being researched and developed throughout the world to improve freezing conditions and product quality. Some inn o v a t i v e f r e e z i n g p r o c e s s e s ( i m p i n g e m e n t a n d hydrofluidisation) are essentially improvements of existing methods (air blast and immersion, respectively) to produce far higher surface heat transfer rates than previous systems and thus improve product quality through rapid freezing. In these cases, the advantages may depend on the size of the product, since the poor thermal conductivity of many foods limits the rate of cooling in large objects rather than the heat transfer between the heat transfer medium and the product. Other processes (pressure shift, magnetic resonance, electrostatic, microwave, radiofrequency, and ultrasound) are adjuncts to existing freezing systems that aim to improve product quality through controlling the way that ice is formed in the food during freezing. Another alternative is to change the properties of the food itself to control how ice is formed during freezing (such as in dehydrofreezing and the use of antifreeze and ice-nucleation proteins).

Effects of Magnetic Fields on Freezing: Application to Biological Products

“…Thus, different strategies such as lowering the refrigerating medium temperature, enhancing the surface heat transfer coefficient, or reducing the size of the products to be frozen have been applied (Reid ; Fikiin ). Only recently, has attention been paid to ice nucleation, and several technologies, such as high pressure, ultrasound, and electric and magnetic fields (MFs), for example, have been proposed to control the nucleation phenomenon (Otero and Sanz ; Kiani and others ; James and others ). All these technologies are applied as adjuncts to existing freezing systems to either inhibit or promote supercooling and, in this way, to control ice formation.…”

Comparisons of Processing Stability and Antioxidant Activity of the Silkworm Pupae Protein Hydrolysates by Spray-dry and Freeze-dry

“…Freeze-drying is based on the dehydration by sublimation of a frozen product. During the freeze-drying process, the low temperature and the absence of liquid water caused the terminate of most microbiological reactions and thus gives a final product with excellent quality [9,10]. As for food-derived protein hydrolysates, they are mostly the mixtures of proteins, poly-/oligo-peptides, free amino acids and even some glycoprotein or lipoprotein.…”

Ice nucleation active bacteria from pistachio in Kerman Province, Iran

“…These findings may be applicable in the production of natural pesticides (Tang et al 2004. ; Lee et al 2016), frost prevention (Lorv et al 2014), food uses (James et al 2015) and artificial snow (Cid et al 2016).…”