Ozone as a disinfectant for food processing water treatment: Disinfection efficiency and impact on food quality

The purpose of this research project was to evaluate the effectiveness of ozonation on microbial reduction and its impact on food quality for minimally-processed fresh vegetables and fruits and quantify microbial inactivation kinetics and ozone mass transfer efficiency. Extensive experiments were conducted using a batch ozonation reactor s under different ozone concentration, contact time, pH and temperature. Both fresh strawberry and shredded lettuce were chosen as test samples to represent minimally-processed fruits and vegetable due to their importance to farm producers and consumers and susceptibility to microbial contamination. The microbial effectiveness was examined by measuring the inactivation of E. coli, Listeria and Salmonella spp., respectively. Results concluded that ozone can effectively inactivate all the test microorganisms while having little impact on other food quality.