Functionalization of water as a nonthermal approach for ensuring safety and quality of meat and seafood products

Abstract

Meat and seafood products present a viable medium for microbial propagation, which contributes to foodborne illnesses and quality losses. The development of novel and effective techniques for microbial decontamination is therefore vital to the food industry. Water presents a unique advantage for large-scale applications, which can be functionalized to inactivate microbial growth, ensuring the safety and quality of meat and seafood products. By taking into account the increased popularity of functionalized water utilization through electrolysis, ozonation and cold plasma technology, relevant literature regarding their applications in meat and seafood safety and quality are reviewed. In addition, the principles of generating functionalized water are presented, and the safety issues associated with their uses are also discussed.

Functionalization of water is a promising approach for the microbiological safety and quality of meat and seafood products and possesses synergistic effects when combined with other decontamination approaches. However, functionalized water is often misused since the active antimicrobial component is applied at a much higher concentration, despite the availability of applicable regulations. Functionalized water also shows reduced antimicrobial efficiency and may produce disinfection by-products (DBPs) in the presence of organic matter, especially at a higher concentration of active microbial component. Utilization should be encouraged within regulated guidelines, especially as hurdle technology, while plasma functionalized water which emerges with great potentials should be exploited for future applications. It is hoped that this review should encourage the industry to adopt the functionalized water as an effective alternative technique for the food industry.

Keywords:

• Antimicrobial
• cold plasma
• contamination
• electrolytic
• minimally processed
• ozonized

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31972205) for its support. This research was also supported by the Fishery Development Project of Guangdong (2019B9), the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong (2018A030313701), the S&T Project of Guangdong (2018D1002, 2017B020207002), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2019MS094), the Common Technical Innovation Team of Guangdong Province on Preservation and Logistics of Agricultural Products (2019KJ145) and the Innovation Centre of Guangdong Province for Modern Agricultural Science and Technology on Intelligent Sensing and Precision Control of Agricultural Product Qualities. In addition, Okon Johnson Esua is in receipt of a PhD scholarship (2018GXZ013452) from the China Scholarship Council.