Lifting sustainable food science from lab to industry: An experimental study and development of a Soluble Gas Stabilisation (SGS) flow concept using low-cost off-the-shelf components

Sustainability issues are important for design stakeholders. Food safety is crucial for human health and a significant contributor to climate change. Food waste and packaging usage are problems in today’s food industry. A potential technology to reduce food waste and use less packaging material is the implementation of Soluble Gas Stabilisation (SGS). SGS is a development of Modified Atmosphere Packaging (MAP) seen in stores today, where bacteriostatic CO2 is dissolved into a food product to increase shelf life. Lab-scale, early-phase research has been done to verify the microbiological effectiveness of SGS. However, the research is limited to the biological aspect and does not explore the real-world implications and optimization this technology has the potential to become. E.g, MAP achieves bacteriostatic properties after a few days, and lab-scale SGS achieves this after a few hours, while no research has tried to use as little time as possible, e.g. 5 minutes at high pressures. Therefore, in this thesis, an experimental early-phase prototype SGS flow chamber has been developed, prototyped and tested. The work done in this thesis is the start of two publications going to be submitted to Design 2024 and the Journal of Food Engineering. The experiment conducted in this thesis is a comparison experiment with existing static SGS research. The results suggest some more development is needed before proper amounts of data are able to be collected. The thesis concludes that the flow chamber design may help researchers develop and optimize a way for the SGS technology to be widely adopted in the food processing industry.