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New food freezing concept improves quality, increases safety and cuts energy use:
"A complete change over to this new method of food freezing worldwide could cut energy use by as much as 6.5 billion kilowatt-hours each year while reducing the carbon emissions that go along with generating that power by 4.6 billion kg, the equivalent of removing roughly one million cars from roads," said ARS research food technologist Cristina Bilbao-Sainz. She is with the Healthy Processed Foods Research Unit, part of ARS's Western Regional Research Center (WRRC) in Albany.
"These savings could be achieved without requiring any significant changes in current frozen food manufacturing equipment and infrastructure, if food manufacturers adopt this concept," Bilbao-Sainz added.
The new freezing method, called isochoric freezing, works by storing foods in a sealed, rigid container -- typically made of hard plastic or metal -- completely filled with a liquid such as water. Unlike conventional freezing in which the food is exposed to the air and freezes solid at temperatures below 32 degrees F, isochoric freezing preserves food without turning it to solid ice.
As long as the food stays immersed in the liquid portion, it is protected from ice crystallization, which is the main threat to food quality.
[...] Another benefit of isochoric freezing is that it also kills microbial contaminants during processing.
Journal Reference:
Analysis of global energy savings in the frozen food industry made possible by transitioning from conventional isobaric freezing to isochoric freezing, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews (DOI: 10.1016/j.rser.2021.111621)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by wisnoskij on Sunday September 05 2021, @03:19AM (1 child)
I guess these would be quite large containers? The entire point here seems to be to save energy on not having to do the ice phase change. But their is not a tremendous amount of energy in the ice phase change (at least relative to vapor), so it would be pretty important to only freeze the smallest percentage of ice as possible. Additionally, you are adding mass as you add water, so the water would need to be a tiny percentage of the total mass or cooling it down to liquid 0 would cost more than the phase change savings.
Then not only do we have more mass for transport and special expensive packaging. But it is also less shelf stable as we have put less cold energy into it. And being in the food industry I can say that frozen food is often shipped with inadequate or non existent cooling, with the hope that it a big enough pile of it will stave off melting long enough to get to the destination.
This seems like more of a high end specialty process you might use on the most expensive cuts of meat to ship world wide instead of just regional. People are probably having Kobe beef jetted into their snobby restaurants. With pressurized 0 degree chambers this beef might be put on slow cargo ships at significantly less cost and arrive at the destination months latter.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 05 2021, @04:22PM
Yeah, it would be cheaper, easier, arguably safer to just have a dry ice brick system inside your cool transit system. Sure, there's freezer burn, but we already know about and live with that.
Or, you know, just use less energy-hungry food storage systems.