The role of hydrodynamic cavitation in tuning physicochemical properties of food items: A comprehensive review

Background: Today, food processing industries are looking for alternative technologies with an eco-friendly character for the processing of food, beverages and agricultural crops. Ideally, such technologies may preserve the original properties of the food products while reaching their primary target of application.Scope and approach: At this point, hydrodynamic cavitation (HC) is recognized as one of the potential technologies for food processing since it provides effective conditions to activate and accelerate desired physiochemical transformations of treated medium. Cavitation phenomenon has been interestingly applied in the treatments and processing of foods towards homogenization (high pressure homogenizers, HPH)/mixing of systems, pasteuri-zation/sterilization, degradation of target molecules, among other purposes. Therefore, this review aims to release the progress in applying HC-assisted technologies for the processing of food, beverages and other food items.Key findings and conclusion: Apart from microorganism inactivation mechanisms in pasteurization and sterilization for foods, emulsion formation in food systems, extraction of bioactive compounds, and improvement of physicochemical properties of food systems are reviewed. Here, the advantages and drawbacks of HC compared to other technologies are also addressed and discussed. To finalize, according to the findings of this review, the future trends, perspectives, and research gaps are also given.