Role of dehydration technologies in processing for advanced ready-to-eat foods: A comprehensive review

Abstract

Advanced ready-to-eat foods, which can be consumed directly or only need simple processed before consumption, refer to the products that processing with cutting-edge food science and technology and have better quality attribute. Cold chain and chemical addition are commonly used options to ensure microbial safety of high moisture advanced ready-to-eat foods. However, this requires freezing/thawing processing at high cost or has undesirable residue. Dehydration treatment has the potential to compensate those shortcomings. This article reviewed the positive effects of dehydration on advanced ready-to-eat foods, current application status of dehydration technologies, novel dehydration related technologies and the pathogenic bacteria control of products. It is observed that dehydration treatment is receiving increasing attention for ready-to-eat foods including space foods, 3 D-printed personalized foods and formula foods for special medical purposes. Recently developed drying technologies such as pulsed spouted microwave freeze-drying and infrared freeze-drying have attracted much interest due to their excellent drying characteristics. Finally, intelligent drying, dehydration-nano-hybridization and dehydration-induced multi-dimensional modification technology are some of the emerging R and D areas in this field.

Keywords:

• Advanced ready-to-eat foods
• dehydration
• space foods
• medical purpose food
• 3D/4D printing of foods

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the financial supports from the China Key Research Program (Contract No. 2017YFD0400501), Postgraduate Research & Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province (No. KYCX20_1844), Jiangsu Province Key Laboratory Project of Advanced Food Manufacturing Equipment and Technology (No. FMZ202003), all of which enabled us to carry out this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

We acknowledge the financial supports from the China Key Research Program (Contract No. 2017YFD0400501), Postgraduate Research & Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province (No. KYCX20_1844), Jiangsu Province Key Laboratory Project of Advanced Food Manufacturing Equipment and Technology (No. FMZ202003), all of which enabled us to carry out this study..