High-pressure processing

High-pressure processing is a food preservation treatment that exposes packaged foods to intense hydrostatic pressure, inactivating many microorganisms with little heating.

Pascalization: Food preservation by applying high hydrostatic pressure to inactivate microorganisms and enzymes. This name is often used for the pressure-based preservation method described here.
Avocado pulp: The soft, fatty edible flesh of the avocado, commonly processed into spreads and guacamole. Pressure treatment can preserve refrigerated avocado products while limiting heat-induced flavor and color changes.
Food pasteurization: A treatment that uses controlled heat to reduce disease-causing microorganisms in food. Both treatments reduce pathogens, but pasteurization relies on heat rather than intense pressure.
Listeria monocytogenes: A bacterial pathogen that can grow at refrigeration temperatures and cause listeriosis. Its reduction in ready-to-eat foods is a major food-safety use of post-packaging pressure treatment.
Blaise Pascal: A seventeenth-century French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher associated with the principle of pressure transmission in fluids. The method is sometimes called pascalization in reference to his work on pressure.
Hydrostatic pressure: Pressure exerted equally in all directions by a fluid at rest. Water transmits the treatment pressure uniformly throughout packaged food.
Orange juice: A beverage made by extracting juice from oranges. Pressure-treated juice can retain fresh-like sensory qualities while reducing vegetative pathogens.
Food sterilization: A process that destroys viable microorganisms, including resistant forms, to achieve commercial or complete sterility. Ordinary high-pressure processing generally does not reliably destroy bacterial spores at ambient temperature.
Food safety: The practices and conditions that prevent food from causing illness or injury. Pressure processing contributes to pathogen control but does not replace validated safety systems.
Hite's high-pressure food experiments: Nineteenth-century experiments by Bert Holmes Hite that examined pressure as a way to preserve foods. These early studies demonstrated that pressure could extend the keeping quality of foods.

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