Cold plasma: background, applications and current trends

•Cold plasma shows promising applications for food industries.•It can be used for microbial inactivation and toxin degradation in food products.•Cold plasma can also be used for food packaging materials modifications.

Cold plasma technology offers several potential applications in the food and biomedical industries. This work aims at highlighting the potential applications of cold plasma in food industry highlighting the current research and trends in this area. The main applications of cold plasma for food industry could be grouped as food decontamination, food quality improvement, toxin degradation and surface modifications of packaging materials. Cold plasma has proven to be effective for inactivation of various pathogens and spoilage organisms without adversely affecting the food quality. It has also shown the potential for significant degradation of mycotoxins and pesticides present in the agricultural produce. Current plasma research is driven to analyze its effectiveness against various pathogens in different food products with a keen emphasis to gain insights on the inactivation mechanisms at a molecular level. Although, cold plasma technology has shown promising results, it requires further studies to understand the reactive gas chemistry, toxicological, ecological and economic impacts of this technology.