Recent Advances in Food Process Engineering

Food manufacturing depends heavily on thermal unit operations supplied by fossil-fuelled steam and hot water, and the temperature profile of that demand is unusually favourable to electrification. Pulsed electric field treatment, ohmic heating, radiofrequency heating and microwave heating are frequently presented as a coherent family of electrically driven alternatives capable of reducing both energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, yet the evidence supporting that claim is more heterogeneous and more contested than promotional accounts suggest. This review critically evaluates the published evidence on the energy and carbon performance of these four technologies in food processing, examines why quantitative findings diverge so sharply, and assesses what can defensibly be concluded about their contribution to low-carbon manufacturing. Literature was identified through open scholarly indexes and citation tracking, appraised for methodological adequacy, and synthesised thematically around mechanisms, measured energy outcomes, sources of disagreement, and conditions for implementation. The strongest and most internally consistent evidence concerns process intensification in drying and dehydration, where electromagnetic and electroporation-based methods reduce specific energy consumption substantially relative to purely convective operations. Evidence for pasteurisation and sterilisation is markedly weaker and openly contradictory: independent assessments of comparable products report pulsed electric field processing as both more and less carbon-intensive than conventional thermal treatment, and at least one industrial-scale comparison found microwave flow pasteurisation to consume considerably more electricity than a conventional process. These disagreements are traceable to identifiable methodological choices rather than to genuine physical inconsistency, principally the treatment of conversion losses, the presence or absence of heat recovery in the comparator, the assumed carbon intensity of electricity, the functional unit adopted, and the scale at which measurements were taken. Confidence in aggregate decarbonisation claims is therefore limited. Priorities include standardised energy reporting, transparent system boundaries, pilot-to-industrial validation, and analysis that couples processing choices to grid decarbonisation trajectories and demand-side flexibility.