Non-thermal processing is gaining increasing attention from the scientific community and the food industry, as a strategy to increase products safety maintaining high quality and nutritional properties. However, there are still some aspects that are scarcely known and some novel issues that have arisen in the past few years. On one side, some technologies are characterized by a higher technological readiness level (TRL) and are already implemented in industrial plants, such as HHP, while others, such as CP, are still under investigation for the approval by the novel food legislation in EU. On the other side, even for already consolidated technologies, some aspects are still scarcely known. These technologies have been mainly studied for the inactivation of traditional microbial pathogens of food products, while their effects on emerging pathogens with high level of risk for human safety, such a viruses and parasites and some bacterial species, are completely undervalued and mostly unknown. Therefore, the general objective of the TECH4PATH project is to promote the safety increase of the food supply chain through the optimization of processing procedures of non-thermal technologies for decontamination of fruit and vegetable food products from emergent safety hazards.
Specific objectives (SO) and relative milestones may be summarized as follow:
SO1: Define processing parameters for optimized decontamination of the food products with each proposed technology and for each type of pathogen considered – Milestone: Optimized protocols for CP and HHP aimed at food product decontamination.
SO2: Gain new information on possible inactivation of emerging food safety hazard and share the new information with relevant stakeholders (academia, industry, etc.) – Milestone: Reports on the inactivation level reached for each pathogen on each considered matrix.
SO3: Increase the shelf-life of the food products and reduce food loss and waste – Milestone: Scientific report on shelf-life of processed food products.
SO4: Characterize environmental sustainability of the proposed technological solutions – Milestone: Scientific report on the environmental impact of the proposed solutions compared to the current and existing ones.
SO5: Communicate the project outcomes to the general public to increase people’s trust towards innovative food technologies and disseminate the results as seeds for novel business applications, for the need of EU regulation, and for additional discoveries – Milestone: Report on Dissemination and Communication activities.
The obtained results will allow to expand knowledge on the investigated safety hazards, which are still scarcely known, and on possible control measures allowing also to suggest updates of the relevant legislation.