Enhancing drying efficiency and product quality using advanced pretreatments and analytical tools—An overview

ABSTRACT

Dry food has the advantages of a convenient storage, long shelf life, and so on, which is widely consumed at present. And there is increased awareness of quality attributes of dehydrated foods such as color, texture, flavor, and nutrient content. In this article, we review several potential pretreatment technologies and analytical tools developed in recent years, which can be used to improve drying efficiency and rapid nondestructive detection. High-pressure processing and ultrasonic treatment can disinfect the wet feedstock before drying. Smart drying with online nondestructive testing using advanced analytical tools such as electronic nose, NMR spectra can help improve product quality in food drying. Each technique has its advantages in the field of food drying. Cost-effectiveness of these modern analytical tools will likely improve with more widespread utilization in industrial practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Analytic tools
• food drying efficiency
• pretreatments
• product quality

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the financial support from National Key R&D Program of China (Contract No. 2017YFD0400901), Jiangsu Province (China) Agricultural Innovation Project (Contract No. CX(17)2017), Jiangsu Province (China) “Collaborative Innovation Center for Food Safety and Quality Control” Industry Development Program, Jiangsu Province (China) Infrastructure Project (Contract No. BM2014051) all of which enabled us to perform this study.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by China Key Research Program [Grant number 2017YFD0400901].