ABSTRACT
Due to their perishable nature and being spoiled by microorganisms, safety and microbial quality of milk and dairy products are important issues that need to be addressed. The most common way of ensuring food safety and shelf-life stability is thermal treatment of food. Despite its high effi ciency in inactivating pathogenic or spoilage microorganisms, thermal treatments may well cause color modifi cations, and fl avor changes in foods as well as signifi cant nutritional losses. Consumers’ demand towards more nutritional foods has triggered the efforts of food industry to design alternative strategies to produce safer foods with minimal thermal treatments. Such efforts have emerged novel technologies alternative to heat treatment in food processing. Different thermal and non-thermal processing technologies such as pulsed electric fi elds (PEF), high pressure processing (HPP), ultrasonication, cold plasma, etc. have been tested for processing of milk and dairy products (Cruz-Romero et al. 2006, del Pozo-Insfran et al. 2007, Tahiri et al. 2006). This chapter deals with potential application fi elds of these technologies in milk and dairy processing.
