Assaying the Performance of Anion Plasma Technology Applied for Food Preservation (Case Study: Mustard Green and Orange)

Recently, anion plasma technology has gained public interest for the improvement of human health and biological processing. This study aimed to obtain the effect of preserving food using anion plasma technology on food quality of mustard green and orange. The anion plasma was generated through negative ion generator 12VDC that emitted -2 - 6 kVDC and placed in front of an axial fan in a closed chamber. Furthermore, it was used in treating the samples at different processing times ranging from 5 - 15 hours. The investigation was conducted for seven days with non-isothermal storage at room temperature (25 - 33°C) and the examined food quality included pH-value, weight loss, organoleptic quality, microbial contaminant, and nutritional content. The result showed that there was no significant change in pH-value but a significant percentage weight loss of mustard green (<5%). The optimum processing time accepted by the consumer was 10 hours, obtained by organoleptic analysis from 30 untrained panelists. Furthermore, the efficacy of anion plasma in inhibiting microbial growth at day 7 resulted in 2.59 log reduction of mustard green and 1.81 log reduction of orange. The preserved samples resulted in higher nutrition content over the non-preserved after seven days of storage. In conclusion, anion plasma is a promising new preservation technology for fruit and vegetable. Therefore, further studies to investigate this technology should be conducted.