Research Trends in Food Cold Chain Since 2000

Abstract

All three themes of food technology development in the roadmap of refrigeration and air conditioning technology 2050, issued by the Japan Society of Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers in 2020, are closely related to the cold chain. This paper reviews research trends in the food cold chain since 2000 and discusses future prospects of the themes of food technology development in the roadmap of refrigeration and air conditioning technology. A total of 197 papers included “food” and “cold chain” in the main text and “cold chain” in the title among all research and review papers since 2010 in all academic journals included in ScienceDirect, and two-third of the papers (130 papers) were published within recent five years. Among three themes of food technology development in the roadmap of refrigeration and air conditioning technology 2050, establishing a quality evaluation model for comprehensively assessing a set of freezing, thawing, and eating was considered to be the most challenging issue due to the lack of directly helpful papers for attaining the goal within the range of previous studies reviewed by this paper.