Novel Applications of High Hydrostatic Pressure Processing

By Dr. Jorge Manuel Alexandre Saraiva

University of Aveiro, Portugal

Thursday March 22nd, 2018 at 11:00 am (Mexico City, MX; UTC -06:00)

High pressure (HP) non-thermal pasteurisation up to 600 MPa is being increasingly used worldwide, mainly due to the superior quality of the processed foods. Recently, other applications using lower or moderate pressures (up to 100 MPa) are gaining interest, with two main ones being hyperbaric storage (HS) and fermentation under pressure.

HS is a novel food preservation methodology that instead of controlling the storage temperature (like refrigeration - RF), uses pressure at naturally variable, uncontrolled room-like temperatures to slow down/inhibit microbial growth. HS has no costs to control temperature, being energy only required to reach the pressure, and not to keep it along storage and is so basically energetically costless and with a lower carbon footprint compared to RF. Additionally, latest results show HS as being able to considerably increase shelf life compared to RF.

It has been also recently reported that microbial fermentations performed under sub-lethal pressure can result in useful process modifications, such as the increase of fermentation rates and yields, and/or the formation of different products.