Fakhreddin Salehi

Non-thermal technologies can maintain fruit and vegetable products quality better than traditional thermal processing. Pulsed light (PL) is a non-thermal method for microbial inactivation (vegetative cells and spores) in fruits and vegetables. The PL treatment involves application of intense and short-duration pulses of broad spectrum wavelengths ranging from UV to near-infrared (100 to 1100 nm). This review summarized application of PL technology to control microbial contamination and increasing shelf-life of some fruits and vegetables including apple, blueberries, grape, orange, strawberries, carrot, lettuce, spinach and tomato. The microbial inactivation in very short treatment times, low energy used by this system, flexibility for solid or liquid samples, few residual compounds and no synthetic chemicals that cause environmental pollution or harm humans, are benefits of PL technique. The efficiency of PL disinfection is closely associated with the input voltage, fluence (energy dos