Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Applications in Food Processing

There are global trends for developing green and sustainable technologies in food processing, due to the growing awareness of the importance of environmental preservation and the consumer demand for natural high-value food products. Meeting these particular requirements, supercritical carbon dioxide (SC-CO2) has emerged as an innovative and promising technology for the processing of food ingredients and products. Over the last two decades, applications of SC-CO2 have attracted much attention and made great advancements at both laboratory and industrial level. These advances include the extraction of target bioactive compounds from various food matrices, microencapsulation, or extrusion to produce fine particles, and the inactivation of pathogenic and spoilage microorganisms and endogenous enzymes for food preservation. An example of successfully applying SC-CO2 at the commercial level is the decaffeination of coffee. In this article, an overview of the SC-CO2 applications in food processing including extraction, transformation, preservation, and drying are presented. For each application category, principles, processing parameters, characteristics, and latest applications are critically reviewed.