Non-thermal food processing technology effectively extends the shelf life of fruits and vegetables

In order to effectively enhance the industrial application of plasma technology and solve the problems of preserving and preserving the quality and safety of agricultural products and food, in October 2020, the Capital Institute of Agricultural Safety Industry Technology of Beijing Agricultural College established the "Plasma Engineering Center" (Passman-Lab) and invested special incubation funds to set up a research and development team with Sun Yunjin is the core of the R & D team, dedicated to the research and development of low-temperature plasma technology in the field of agricultural production and food processing of the whole industry chain applications. Based on low-temperature plasma, the R&D team has adopted the original isolated killing and penetration killing technologies, and then built a digital open and precise management and control system through intelligent cloud services to achieve rapid integration of various application scenarios.

Toon is a favorite vegetable, known as "tree vegetables", but its storage difficulty is high, and the taste will change after freezing. To break this bottleneck that restricts the development of the toon industry, Yunjin Sun's team developed a plasma gas preservation technology that can improve the shelf life of toon, breaking the technical barrier to fresh toon preservation and extending the shelf life of toon, helping to extend the industrial chain.

The research team used freshly picked toon as the research object, divided into two groups according to the size of the toon, which were electrically treated for 0 and 10 minutes and then placed in 4°C storage and preserved, with observations recorded every 2-3 days. The researchers said that the control group started to have a slight wilting and stronger smell from the 5th day of storage; from the 7th and 9th day the smell was weak and the wilting was excessive; and on the 19th day it started to grow hair and smell rotten. In the plasma-treated group, there was no significant change at the beginning and a slight wilting at day 19; on day 31, the odor was lighter and there was no rotten smell; after day 40, the samples had a slight hair growth and wilting. In terms of appearance, there is a color change in both the control and treated groups, i.e., the purple-red color at the beginning gradually fades to green, and the color change is more pronounced in the control group. The results of the study showed that the plasma gas preservation technology could extend the shelf life of parsnips by more than 3-5 times, and the preservation effect was outstanding.