Performance of a non-invasive methodology for assessing oxygen diffusion in liquid and solid food products

• We propose a new methodology to determine O2 diffusivity in solid foods.
• It is the only way to assess O2 sorption kinetic in solids without bias.
• We determine the activation energy of DO2DO2 in oil.
• Increasing viscosity of fatty matrices did not impact their DO2DO2 values.
• DO2DO2 could not be predicted solely from food water weight fraction and DO2DO2 of water.

Based on the measurement of local oxygen partial pressure kinetic, a non-invasive methodology was proposed to assess O2 diffusivity (DO2DO2) in liquid, viscous and solid matrices. This new method was compared with a previous invasive method, developed by the same group, based on the same principle. The new method has proven to be essential to measure DO2DO2 in solid food matrices where invasive methods usually failed. It was successfully used to obtain DO2DO2 of cooked ham and processed cheese which were found respectively equal to 0.450 ± 0.004 × 10−9 m2·s−1 and 1.15 ± 0.11 × 10−9 m2·s−1 at 20 °C. DO2DO2 was also evaluated as a function of temperature (from 5 to 30 °C) and viscosity in lipid-based matrices. These results have permitted to determine activation energy of the diffusion and have revealed that increasing viscosity of the lipid matrices tested did not impact their DO2DO2 values.