Plasma Treatment of Food

Plasma treatments are known for their antimicrobial effectiveness for more than 100 years. The invention of ozone tube by Werner von Siemens in 1857 leads to technical applications in the fields of communal tap water purification in small villages in Germany and in 1916 in St. Petersburg. Nikola Tesla was filed a patent for a corona discharge ozone generator used with ambient air in the USA in 1896. He founded the Tesla Ozone Co. in 1900 and started the production of these devices for therapeutic applications. Despite of this early success there are in comparison only few attempts to use the plasma technology for food treatment in the past. In the last decades there is an increasing interest in facing the problems caused by natural products with their high variety in size and shape. Beside these very obvious parameters hidden parameters like fluctuating water content increases the difficulties to achieve stable and reliable plasma processes. Therefore, in the beginning of this progress the treatment of seeds with low water content, a rigid hull and small size giving the possibility to treat large ensembles are in the focus of the researchers. The first aim of these treatments was to improving and modifying germination [1, 2]. This was followed by more complex products as fresh products for consumption as e. g. meat [3] or fruits and fresh cut salads as describe in this work. (C) 2015 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim