In the global food industry, fishery products have attracted considerable importance as a source of proteins, Poly Unsaturated Fatty Acids (PUFA), vitamins and minerals. Fish is highly perishable commodity and hence suitable processing and packaging techniques helps in maintaining the quality of fish. Driven by the needs of consumers regarding high quality processed foods with minimal changes in nutritional and sensory properties and with the advent of technology, lot of alternative or novel technologies have come into the foray of fish processing and packaging.
High Pressure Processing is an innovative non-thermal technology that has a great potential for extending the shelf-life with minimal or no heat treatment. Pressure Shift Freezing and Pressure Assisted Thawing are getting popular with considerable advantages over conventional processing. Pulsed Light Preservation, involving short time high-peak pulses of broad-spectrum white light, is a non-thermal technology for decontamination of food surfaces and food packages. Similarly, Pulsed Electric Field processing with the application of very short electric pulses at different electric field intensities is used. Ultrasound processing and Ultrasound thawing using sound waves above frequency of 20MHz are used as tools for fish processing. Ohmic heating and Microwave heating are other emerging technologies with large number of applications.
Active packaging involving various active components such as antimicrobials, antioxidants, O2 scavengers, CO2 emitters/absorbers, moisture regulators, flavor releasers have been included in the package system for augmenting the packaging performance. Currently, the use of edible biomaterials, plant derived extracts and nanomaterials are popularized to substitute synthetic additives due to their packaging and waste management notions. Intelligent or Smart packaging is an area which is emerging at a very rapid pace with the development of novel indicators like time-temperature indicators, leakage indicator, freshness indicator, gas indicators; automatic identification devices like barcodes, RFID systems; and sensors like biosensors, gas sensors.