# Quality of Tomato Juice as Influenced by Non-Thermal Air Plasma Treatment
## 4 Conclusions  
Currently, the microbiological safety of food is the main task to be fulfilled by the food market. An extremely important issue is the ability to create systemic mechanisms ensuring an appropriate quality of freshly pressed fruit and vegetable juices, which are a particularly unstable food material. Products of this type should not only provide essential nutrients but should also exhibit high storage stability and availability facilitating trading in the retail chains.  
Non-thermal air plasma generated in a Glide-arc reactor resulted in the significant improvement in the microbiological quality of tomato juice after just 300 s. Extending the treatment time to 600 s made it possible to further reduce the number of microorganisms to \(<\) 1 log CFU/mL, i.e., below the quantification limit. Properties, such as pH, Brix, lycopene, and vitamin C, were slightly increased by cold plasma treatment. During storage time, the CAP juice was more stable, while the untreated juice (control) showed gradual changes in physicochemical properties. The CAP treatment may better preserve the original color of the tomato juice, especially after time storage, since the samples tested on day 10 were characterized by the lowest absolute value of color difference (\(\Delta E\)).  
The application of the analyzed processing technique has many advantages in terms of both the microbiological quality and the nutritional value of products. The results presented in this study may contribute to the use of this method on an industrial scale. Despite its several aforementioned negative effects on the quality traits of products or the restrictions on its commercial use, the popularity of plasma treatment is growing rapidly, and the method arouses interest among technologists. Given the number of recent studies and the progress in plasma science, this technique has the potential to help food producers to improve product safety in the near future.  
Conceptualization, A.S.-W., J.P., M.K. ([PERSON]) and P.T.; methodology, A.S.-W., A.S., J.P. and M.K. ([PERSON]); investigation, A.S.-W., J.P., M.K. ([PERSON]), P.T., M.K. ([PERSON]), E.O.; data curation A.S.-W., J.P., A.S., E.G., E.O., M.K. ([PERSON]), N.M. and N.H.; writing--original draft preparation, A.S.-W. and J.P.; writing--review and editing, A.S.-W., A.S., N.M., N.H.; visualization, J.P. and A.S.-W.; founding acquisition, J.P., A.S.-W. and E.G., supervision, J.P. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
This research was founded from ZUL (Union of Lublin Universities) \"INTERPROJEKT\" grant no. INT/004/2022/I-N.  
Not applicable.  
Data Availability Statement: Data available upon justified request after contact with authors.  
We would like to thank [PERSON] (Keyence International) for help in evaluation of morphology of the samples. We are grateful the fruitful discussions in the following cooperative initiatives: COST Actions CA19110 (Plasma applications for smart and sustainable agriculture), CA20114 (Therapeutic applications of Cold Plasmas); CEEPUS CIII-AT-0063, Inkubator Innovacyjnosci Politechnika Lubelska, and Polish-Slovak Bilateral Cooperation Programme (PlasmaBioAgro) PPN/BIL/2018/1/00065, SK-PL-18-0090.  
The authors declare no conflict of interest.