Application of high pressure processing in ensuring food safety

As being one of the most popular non-thermal food processing and hurdle technologies, high pressure processing (HPP) is widely used to assure food safety and obtain food matrices with high nutritional value and longer shelf life. Food safety might be conceptualized with distinctive subjects, however mostly dominated by microbial safety. Numerous studies have been applied to investigate the effect of HPP on the safety of various food materials in the last decades, particularly associated with reducing the microbial load including some types of bacteria (both vegetative and spore forming cells), molds, yeasts, parasites, and viruses. Detoxification and prevention of toxin production in food materials are also considered as significant effects of HPP for food safety concern. On the other hand, the influence of high-pressure treatment on natural food allergens in order to decrease/inhibit their undesirable health-demoting effects is a promising research area aiming to produce fresh and allergen-free food products. HPP is an important non-thermal tool to obtain gently processed but safer food products when applied either alone or in combination with other hurdle treatments.