In recent years, the range of equipment and applications for high pressure pasteurization has gradually increased on the European market. Sterilization under conditions of elevated pressures is in the pipeline, albeit at the research level. Knowledge on the effect of high pressure/high temperature processing on food safety and quality attributes is still too limited. This review discusses recent progress made in understanding the impact of high pressure/high temperature processing on food safety and quality attributes of fruit and vegetable based products, within the EU FP6 integrated project NovelQ.
Methodological approach for kinetic studies under HP/HT conditionsWhen performing a kinetic study, process parameters need to be, if not kept constant, at least documented as completely as possible. Rate constants strongly depend on pressure and temperature, both critical process parameters in HP/HT processing. Therefore, incorrectly assuming that process parameters are constant or inadequate knowledge of the temperature, pressure history will lead to incorrect estimates of the kinetic parameters (e.g. rate constants, activation energy and activation volume). Moreover these cannot then be extrapolated to different equipment (Van der Plancken et al., 2008). This is even more pertinent, when larger scale high pressure vessels are used, in which major temperature non-uniformity may arise (Grauwet, Van der Plancken,