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Consumers today seek high-quality foods that have minimal nutrient loss, are microbiologically safe, and are ready to eat. Consumers are becoming more aware of the health advantages and risks linked with food product viz. microbial, physical, and chemical concerns. Emerging technologies in food processing are the focus of development to meet specific consumer demands for healthful, safe, and minimally processed foods. Food processing companies are working harder than ever to improve food quality and safety around the world. The new consumer is facing different demands from the past like healthy, convenient, safe, fresh-quality, and sustainable foods. Forward osmosis, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, ozone, nanobiosensors, and bio-based composites are some of the advanced technologies that can be utilized to epitomize scalable and flexible food manufacturing processes. Biomimicry is the imitation or copying of an environment in all of its aspects, methods, and operations in order to solve the world’s most important problems.

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Electrodialysis (ED) is an electro-membrane method which modifies the ionic composition of liquids by using ion permeable membranes and direct electrical potential. Despite the fact that ED is a membrane separation process, it has some variations from other methods like nanofiltration, reverse osmosis, and ultrafiltration because it separates particles based on their electrical charges rather than their size. The theory and applications of ED as it relates to the food industry will be covered in this chapter. In general ED system flow, compartments or cells are composed of ion exchange membranes arranged systematically, which separates the ions under the influence of electric fields. The design of ED systems is generally application oriented. The design of the membrane stack determines how many ions need to be eliminated. A membrane stack may be arranged vertically or horizontally.

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Conventional drying techniques alter physico-chemical, nutritional, and organoleptic properties, affecting the product’s acceptability by consumers. Changing eating habits and consumer awareness about healthy and nutrient-rich ready-to-eat products created the need for continuous modification or development of innovative drying techniques. Refractance window (RW) drying is one of the innovative and promising techniques that has attracted the attention of several researchers owing to its diversified features. This technique employs hot water for conducting thermal energy to the material for drying. The demonstrative advantages and positive benefits, like maximum retention of nutritional and quality parameters, low product temperature, rapid drying, lower energy intensiveness, and higher thermal efficiency, constitute the characteristic features of this drying mechanism. The technique is reportedly suitable for heat-labile products for preserving the desired aroma, color, antioxidants, and nutritional properties. Refractance window drying involves conduction, convection, and radiation for moisture removal while applying a thin, transparent, infrared Mylar film which effectively forms a “window”. Researchers have obtained quality dried products with the RW technique on a par with those of lyophilized products. Simple equipment design with safety, lower processing cost, and negligible environmental impact are additional advantages associated which are lacking in other conventional drying techniques. RW drying has immense possibilities and scope to be established and adopted by the food industries for drying of food products to obtain superior-quality valorized products.

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One of the most important fundamentals for the endorsement of safety and quality management in food processing industries is the competent inactivation of spoilage and disease-causing microorganisms from various food commodities. This chapter attempts to describe the physical and chemical characteristics of ozone, techno-functional aspects of microbial inactivation, target locations for disinfection activity, aids in creating complimentary associations with ozone molecules to enhance its disinfection potential, contemporary functions of ozone in the area of food processing industries, and technical glitches often encountered in the implementation of ozone processing in food industries, along with credible and interesting upcoming applications. There is an wide scale of physical characteristics that have a substantial influence over the solubility characterization of ozone. While investigating the potential of gaseous ozone as an antifungal fumigant for grains for storage, Wu et al. postulated that when it comes to the stability of ozone, the gaseous state of disinfectant has superior stability compared to that of the aqueous phase.

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Food packaging is an emerging field of research that is vital for ensuring the protection of food materials to aid and monitor the proper supply of food. The most important function of food packaging material is to prevent the spoilage of food, extend shelf life and appeal to consumers. Conventionally, numerous petroleum-based polymers are used for the synthesis of packaging material, leading to an enormous amount of plastic in the environment, creating pollution. In an attempt to find a suitable replacement for it, biopolymers are analysed for their roles to replace petroleum-based products. Biopolymers could be isolated from many bio-based sources that are renewable and capable of providing sustainable solutions to overcome the hazards of petroleum products. Macromolecules like polysaccharides, proteins, and lipids have been widely explored for their role as packaging material. Usually, these macromolecules have undesirable properties when they are used for fabrication alone, so they are combined to improve properties like physical, mechanical, thermal, gas carrier and other traits that make up ideal packaging material. Biocomposites come into play with enhanced properties and could be coupled with other active agents with antimicrobial and antioxidant properties for the production of smart packaging material. Thus, a new arena of sustainable packaging with smart features could be developed using biocomposites. Their processibility and improved properties would make them promising in the near future for the manufacture of food packaging materials.

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The biospeckle laser technique is a non-destructive quality detection tool utilized for the evaluation of biological materials. It is rapid, simple to operate and inexpensive and ensures the quality and safety of fresh produce. The biological activity of materials is transformed due to contamination, damages and maturation, and it needs to be analysed at regular intervals. Usually food quality analysis involves destruction of the produce, leading to loss of food and also longer analysis time. However, these factors can be analysed non-destructively by using the novel biospeckle technique. This process can be enhanced by coupling it with numerical processing methods to reveal the speckle pattern of the analysed food item. Various qualitative and quantitative methods, like Fuiji, absolute value difference, moment of inertia and generalized difference have been developed for the effective analysis of speckles. This technique is particularly used to spot bruising, maturation and ripening changes in fruits and vegetables, meat quality detection, fungal colony infection and seed viability, among other things.

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Increasing food decontamination is a major challenge for food security, and advancement in resistance to microbes is even a bigger challenge. Food decontamination is vital for sustainable food safety, which is difficult when taking into consideration consumer dislike of highly processed foods. Traditional decontamination techniques involve treatments that, besides providing safe food, lead to the loss of volatiles and various bioactive compounds in different food products. Cold plasma is a potential non-thermal technique in the food industry that is rapid, efficient and highly sustainable, leading to quick microbial or pesticide decontamination without leaving any residue. Due to its diverse and environmentally friendly nature, this technique has drawn attention and is being duly explored for various food applications. This chapter covers the fundamentals of this technique with all the advancements and uses in food decontamination, besides giving insight into the dissipation of various toxins and contaminants from raw and processed food products. It also highlights various loopholes in the techniques and the limitations attached to them that need rigorous scientific intervention to make this a globally accepted processing technique in the food industry without undue resistance from consumers.

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Biomimicry is the scientific discipline of imitating natural objects and processes to design systems and synthesize materials. More recently, biomimetic approaches have found their way into food technology applications. The objective of this chapter is to comprehensively present the available literature focused on biomimicry applications in the design of novel food products and processing technologies inspired by nature. Four different approaches are discussed in the current chapter:. in vitro or cultured meat, biomimetic human milk, bioartificial/electronic tongues and biomimetic membranes. Cultured meat offers a safe new meat alternative with customized nutritional properties especially for those concerned with environmental and animal welfare. Similarly, biomimetic milk is intended to replicate the structure of human milk in addition to biochemical composition to deliver biological functionality in infant formulae similar to human milk. Electronic tongues are electrochemical devices equipped with sensors and data processing units for better identification and quantification of flavor compounds for potential applications in sensory evaluation of foods. Biomimetic membranes are being designed on the intricate structures and principles from living cells, as they possess excellent transport function through biological membranes inside and outside cells. In addition to the underlying principles, potential food industry applications and recent advances are also discussed.

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Nanoparticles (NPs) suspended in or dispersed in base fluids are known as nanofluids. According to several studies, nanofluids have better heat-transfer properties than base fluids in which NPs are floating. Additionally, evidence from several reviews and experimental research shows that the use of nanofluids significantly improved thermal conductivity (7–50%) and heat transfer coefficient. Nanofluids have been utilized as a heating medium in heat exchangers such as shell- and tube-type heat exchangers and plate heat exchangers for food processing. In particular, watermelon juice, tomato juice, tomato paste and milk have been processed using nanofluids and explored for quality parameters related to colour, pH, lycopene retention, vitamin C retention and total phenolic content. Nanofluids have high heat transfer properties, though nanofluids also showed a higher pressure drop in practice. Stabilizers have been used by researchers to overcome the problem of pressure drops and clogging. Recently researchers are exploring hybrid nanofluids owing to their excellent aspect ratio, superior thermal complex and synergistic effect of nanoparticle mixtures.

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The significant growth of nanotechnology in recent years has provided us with the emergence of various unique and useful nanomaterials for the fabrication of new sensing devices, overcoming the existing limitations of the food sector to cut down wastage, increase shelf life, evaluate safety and enhance food quality. Owing to the unique properties of nanomaterials such as high surface area and remarkable conductivity as well as good electrochemical, mechanical, physiological, magnetic and optical properties, nanobiosensors have proved their superior reliability, sensitivity and rapid analysis against conventional sensors associated with an inefficient limit of detection (LOD). Various nanostructures such as nanoparticles, quantum dots and nanotubes usually work by offering novel signal transduction due to amplified signals leading to improved sensitivity and achieving a lower limit of detection. They possess the potential to be incorporated in biological and chemical sensors to facilitate development of sensitive and rapid analytical devices to detect various toxins, allergens and pathogens and assess quality and freshness of food products. This chapter summarizes various studies on nanostructures being used for the fabrication of biosensing technologies and their mode of action, impact on food properties and potential applications in the food sector.