Pulsed electric field and mild heating for milk processing: a review on recent advances

Pulsed electric field (PEF) treatment consists of exposing food to electrical fields between electrodes within a treatment chamber, which can improve the preservation of fresh-like products such as milk. Although several studies support the use of PEF technology to process milk at low temperature, these studies reported microbial reductions of around 3 log₁₀ cycles and also indicated a limited impact of PEF on some endogenous and microbial enzymes. This scenario indicates that increasing the impact of PEF on both enzymes and microorganisms remains a major challenge for this technology in milk processing. More recently, combining PEF with mild heating (below pasteurization condition) has been explored as an alternative processing technology to enhance the safety and to preserve the quality of fresh milk and milk products. Mild heating with PEF enhanced the safety of milk and derived products (3 log₁₀ -6 log₁₀ cycles reduction on microbial load and drastic impact on the activity enzymes related to quality decay). Moreover, with this approach, there was minimal impact on enzymes of technological and safety relevance, proteins, milk fat globules, and nutrients (particularly for vitamins) and improvements in the shelf-life of milk and selected derived products were obtained. Finally, further experiments should consider the use of milk processed by PEF with mild heating on cheese-making. The combined approach of PEF with mild heating to process milk and derived products is very promising. The characteristics of current PEF systems (which is being used at an industrial level in several countries) and their use in the liquid food industry, particularly for milk and some milk products, could advance towards this strategy. © 2019 Society of Chemical Industry.