# Ohmic Heating in the Food Industry: Developments in Concepts and Applications during 2013-2020
## 10 Effect of Ohmic Heating on Inactivation of Enzymes in Food
### Future Trends  
Ohmic heating is a highly energy efficient process and it has been reported to have many promising future applications in food and other industries. It can be used alone or in combination with other processing techniques. Ohmic heating has been evaluated in combination with other thermal techniques for its effectiveness. The combination of ohmic heating and infrared heating was more effective to reduce the mesophilic microflora in the meatball samples [108].  
Ohmic heating application for sterilization and aseptic packaging holds key promising features in the future. Ohmic treatment may be successfully applied as an alternative method to conventional sterilization to maintain the nutritional quality of protein in vegetable baby foods [109].  
Recent findings point out that whey protein networks can be modified by ohmic heating treatments and can be potentially used as a matrix for the incorporation of probiotic entities [110]. One of the novel future applications of ohmic heating is ohmic-assisted hydrodistillation (OAHD) based on volumetric heating for distillation of ethanol and essential oils, which is considered better than traditional distillation methods [111].  
Pressure ohmic thermal sterilization (POTS) involves ohmic heating of foods by applying an electric field under elevated pressure. POTS treated carrot samples had better quality attributes than those processed using ohmic heating and pressure-assisted thermal processing [112, 113].  
The peeling of most of the vegetables in food industries relies on the usage of lye or steam peelings, which results in high pH waste and excessive water use. [PERSON] and [PERSON] [114] found tomatoes treated ohmic heating in salt solution required reduced lye concentrations.  
Researchers have developed novel electrically conductive food packages that can be used to heat the food and its package after packing to avoid post-process contamination and to serve consumer needs for convenience [115].  
The non-food applications of ohmic treatment includes seawater desalination and waste treatment such as sterilization of animal wastes, heating of clay slip and other slurries, sewage sludge, and compost leachate by ohmic heating have important future uses in food and other industries [116].  
Scale-up of ohmic heating is an important consideration for development and future use of this technology. It is generally envisaged that scale-up of ohmic heating does not have limitations present in other novel technologies like microwave or infrared heating. The generally uniform nature of the electricity generation results in uniform heating, which makes scale-up of the process easier [4]. Obviously, with an electrode based technology, electrochemical reactions and metal ion migration occurring at the interface of food and electrodes during heating treatment present problems such as fouling and electrode corrosion [90]. These reactions generally make the process establishment task more challenging, however, with proper controls and instrumentation, coupled with a good critical control plan and hazard analysis plans, make monitoring of larger-scale ohmic heating systems easier. Additionally, with scale-up, the cleaning and maintenance becomes easier. Thus, ohmic heating is becoming increasingly attractive for large-scale processing of viscous products with particulates such as thick soups, sauces, stews, salsas, milk, ice-cream mix, egg, whey, soymilk, and other heat-sensitive liquids with particulates [114].