The use of supercooling for fresh foods: A review

Abstract

Supercooling is a food processing technique which has the potential to significantly increase the shelf life of foods and to reduce wastage of food products from the production and retail sectors. The process uses storage temperatures below the initial freezing point of the food without the product freezing, which maintains the quality attributes associated with fresh foods. The removal of the freezing process leads to shorter processing times from harvest to delivery to retail as well as lower energy consumption (no latent heat removal) and so lower emissions during manufacture when compared to standard frozen food production.Professor Judith Evans London South Bank University Churchill Building Langford, Bristol BS40 5DU, UK July 2014Dear Professor Singh, Please find enclosed a revised copy of the manuscript entitled "The use of supercooling for fresh foods: a review".We hope that we have managed to successfully answer the points raised by reviewers and would like to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments. Yours sincerely, Judith Evans (Professor)Cover Letter JFOODENG-S-14-00484-4: The use of supercooling for fresh foods: a reviewReviewers comments are listed below in black, responses are listed in red. Reviewer1The paper reads well even though very descriptive Many thanks. HOWEVER,A clearer definition of supercooling is done, some other process should be mentionedWe are not totally clear what the reviewer means by 'some other processes should be mentioned'. The paper covers supercooling and so in our view other processes are not relevant. If the editor disagrees, and could help us by clarifying this point, we are more than happy to amend the paper according to this point.In clear, it seems that Supercooling = as described in the paper even though for some authors, the temperature is between 0°C and IFP (initial freezing point), Chilling is between 0°C and IFP (initial freezing point), Superchilling is below IFP In France, the ministry of agriculture has issued a not on the topic: NOTE DE SERVICE DGAL/SDSSA/N2014-281 Date: 9 avril 2014 They accept only storage below 0°C but above the initial freezing point ; this is supported by EU regulations.Although this is a useful point we are not sure it is totally relevant. The aim of the paper is to review supercooling, how it is achieved and where it has been used in the past. It can be argued that when we supercool that we are actually still above the initial freezing point as we do not have any ice.Several papers are missing. In particular, the anteriority of Le Danois is hard to skip (ref below), Le Danois, E., 1920, Nouvelle méthode de frigorification du poisson, French Patent No. 506.296.The patent from Le Danois refers to superchilling and not supercooling and this is why we have ignored it. We could not access the original patent but this point is clearly is clearly stated in:Advances in superchilling of food -Process characteristics and product quality. Ola M. Magnussen, Anders Haugland, Anne K. Torstveit Hemmingsen, Solfrid Johansen,Tom S. T...

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