Food technology and food preservation: an old necessity with a promising future.

Refrigeration preserves our food, preventing its rapid and uncontrolled evolution. Thus it enables the increase in food supply for ever growing populations living in cities becoming larger and larger. According to this reality and to the obvious that refrigeration allows a significant reduction of food losses, it is commonly accepted that the development of refrigeration is indispensable to the sustainable development of our today's and tomorrow's world. But refrigeration is not only food preservation: it is also widely used in food process and food production. Since the beginning of the development of artificial refrigeration, the used technologies are based on fundamental principles which remain inescapable. On one hand, the predominance of cold production based on compression – expansion cycles with phase change of a refrigerant. And on the other hand, the use of gaseous or liquid cooled media to ensure cooling of food products. These technologies sometime use some environmentally unfriendly refrigerants. They are energy consuming. And their performances are limited on one hand by the limits of the thermodynamics and on the other hand by the limits of heat and mass transfer rate between the cooling media and the food product. After a short overview of this problematic, this paper gives some information on possible alternatives to refrigeration and on technological novelties in refrigeration processes in food industry. It also indicates the major trends and progresses in the modelling of refrigeration processes.