Recent advances in quality retention of non-frozen fish and fishery products: A review

Abstract

Fishery products are delicious, nutritional and healthy foods, and their popularity in today's market is growing. With the changes in consumer consumption expectations as well as the development of reliable cold-chains, fresh preprocessed fishery products such as fillets are more popular with consumers and producers because of their convenience for processing and cooking. However, fishery products after being removed from water have a short shelf life due to their intrinsic characteristics. Therefore, developing effective preservation technology to extend postmortem shelf life of fishery products has been an on-going area of study. This review summarizes the patterns of quality deterioration and external factors that affect postmortem quality of fishery products, and then updates the recent advances with preservation methods for fishery products including superchilling, modified atmosphere packaging, active packaging, edible coatings, irradiation and high hydrostatic pressure. Moreover, the advantages and disadvantages of each technology are discussed, and future trends for improving the preservation of fishery products are also discussed.

Keywords: Fishery products; active packaging; edible coatings; high hydrostatic pressure; irradiation; modified atmosphere packaging; superchilling.