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The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the hygienic design of a scalable unit for supercritical carbon dioxide drying of food.

For the purpose of this study, a checklist has been developed, covering requirements from sanitary standards and industry-tailored guidelines. Beyond hygienic design, failure mode and effects analysis of the results were performed to assess the potential food safety risks that may arise from failures to hygienic design requirements.

The overall score of the hygienic design was 46 percent. This kind of evaluation revealed two types of nonconformities. The first type was related to inadequate sanitary procedures. The second type was associated to design failures.

The highest risk was designated to problems related to cleaning and sanitation followed by risks associated with the formation of dead zones and biofilms.

This study provides valuable insight to engineers and food technologists on hygienic design issues.

Application of a similar methodology was used for evaluating hygienic design of other non-thermal food technologies.

Supercritical carbon dioxide (sc-CO₂) is a promising novel treatment that might be used in the food industry, such as sc-CO₂ pasteurisation and sc-CO₂ drying. Before sc-CO₂ treated foodstuffs may be introduced to European market, they have to be authorised according to novel food regulation. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to give an overview of available literature data on sc-CO₂ treated fruits and vegetables, which might be used for novel food authorisation.

The paper is based on literature data available via Science Direct, EBSCO and Wiley concerning sc-CO₂ pasteurisation and drying of fruits/vegetables. Studies performed on animal foodstuffs were manually excluded, while articles related to novel foods and legislation were included in the study.

Database search resulted 34 articles related to microbiological and compositional/nutritional changes in sc-CO₂ treated foods. Obtained data indicated that sc-CO₂ pasteurisation is effective in inactivating microorganisms in liquids, while no general conclusion on the microbiological quality of sc-CO₂ pasteurised solid foods or sc-CO₂ dried foods could be made. Available literature data showed that sc-CO₂ pasteurisation did not result in significant compositional/nutritional changes in liquids, while for sc-CO₂ pasteurised solid foods or sc-CO₂ dried foods, one is not able to make common conclusions due to insufficient research data. Therefore, additional research and case-by-case study for each treated food have to be prepared.

This study is original to the extent that it brought together available information on sc-CO₂ pasteurised and dried foods, needed the novel food application.