Recently, the research team of Prof. Jinfeng Bi, innovation team of fruit and vegetable processing and quality control of Institute of Food Science and Technology (IFST), optimized high-pressure homogenization (HPH) parameters for not-from-concentrate combined peach and carrot juices, based on a two-step comprehensive model using factor analysis and analytic hierarchy process methods. The relevant research results were published in the journal Food Chemistry (IF: 7.514) with the title “Modelling and optimization of high-pressure homogenization of not-from-concentrate juice: Achieving better juice quality using sustainable production”.

In recent years, studies have been conducted on the optimization of processing parameters for juice production focusing on individual quality attributes. However, there is a lack of information on optimization models for the processing parameters with respect to the comprehensive quality attributes. Moreover, studies on prediction models for the antioxidant capacity of fruit and vegetable juices are also limited. The present work optimized high-pressure homogenization (HPH) parameters for not-from-concentrate combined peach and carrot juices, based on a two-step comprehensive model using factor analysis and analytic hierarchy process methods. Results showed that treating combined juice with pressures over 200 MPa retained more amounts of the bioactive compounds (carotenoids and polyphenols) than non-homogenization. Nutrition-oriented optimization, with higher judgement weight on nutritional properties, and sense-oriented optimization, with higher weight on sensory properties, were set up. Combined juice (250 MPa, 1 pass and 25 °C) had the best quality, based on the nutrition- and sense-oriented models. Back propagation neural network (BPNN) models could predict antioxidant capacities of the combined juice with greater accuracy compared with stepwise linear regression. The relative errors of BPNN prediction model were ≤ 5%.

Joint PhD student Jianing Liu is the first author, and Prof. Jinfeng Bi and Prof. Xuan Liu are co-corresponding authors. This work was supported by the Agricultural Science and Technology Innovation Program (CAAS-ASTIP-2020-IFST-01), the earmarked fund for China Agriculture Research System (CARS-30-5-02) and Joint PhD Program between Wageningen University & Research (WUR) and Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) (No. MOE11NL1A20151701N).

Fig. 1. Scheme of modelling and optimization of HPH-treated combined juices.

Fig. 2. Pearson correlation analysis of sensory and physicochemical properties of combined juices. Numbers from 1 to 48 represent the different indicators on the hypotenuse of the right triangle sequentially. The colour represents a positive (red) or negative (blue) correlation between these indicators, and the higher colour intensity represents the higher level of the correlation coefficient.

Link to the paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodchem.2021.131058