Designing an industrial-scale radio frequency decontamination process for peanut butter

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reported outbreaks of Salmonella, particularly associated with low-moisture foods including peanut butter. Even though roasting is included along the processing line, the presence of these safety issues indicates the requirement of process following the packaging of the samples. Because of the lower thermal diffusivity of the peanut butter, a conventional thermal process is expected to be challenging with expected temperature non-uniformities. Therefore, radio frequency (RF) heating was considered in this study for thermal processing of peanut butter samples. For this purpose, a computational model was developed to determine the temperature change of peanut butter samples. Experimental studies for model validation were completed in a 10 kW - 27.12 MHz RF system at 3300 and 4000 V electrode potentials. Following the model validation, a comparison to the conventional thermal processing was presented, and industrial scale thermal processing studies were applied where up to 30 packaged samples were placed within the RF cavity. Process efficiency was determined with the process time decrease, temperature uniformity and decontamination effects. Science4Impact: This study demonstrated RF processing for an efficient thermal decontamination with uniform temperature distribution attained within the samples in an industrial scale process.