Membrane Technology in Food Processing

Dear Colleagues,

The application of membrane technology in the food and beverage industries increased dramatically in the 1980s. Today, the food industry represents the second biggest worldwide industrial market for membranes after water and wastewater treatment, with a market volume of 800–850 million euro/year. Increase in demand for food and beverages, the high product purity requirements of numerous companies, and availability of diverse fields of application for the membrane technology drive the market.

Pressure-driven membrane processes, such as microfiltration (MF), ultrafiltration (UF), nanofiltration (NF), and reverse osmosis (RO) are today well-established operations in a wide range of food and beverage processing on an industrial scale. These processes offer significant advantages in terms of selective fractionation of food products, volume reduction, and product recovery at mild conditions when compared with conventional techniques or as novel technologies for processing new ingredients and foods.

Other membrane processes, such as pervaporation (PV), electrodialysis (ED), membrane bioreactors (MBRs), membrane emulsification (ME), forward osmosis (FO), membrane distillation (MD), and osmotic distillation (OD), are promising technologies for a wide range of food applications, including aroma recovery, dealcoholization, dehydration, deacidification, concentration, and biotransformation. In addition, the combination of different membrane unit operations in integrated membrane systems offers new interesting perspectives in terms of competitiveness, improvement of food quality, process or product novelty, and environmental friendliness.

This Special Issue of Foods welcomes works related to the topic of membrane technology in food processing. Original contributions including theoretical and experimental insights as well as reviews on recent advances on membrane operations and integrated membrane systems in various fields of the food production (i.e., fruit juice and beverage, milk, wine, beer, vegetable oil, etc.) are greatly welcome.

Dr. Carmela Conidi
Dr. Alfredo Cassano
Guest Editors

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