# Ohmic Heating in the Food Industry: Developments in Concepts and Applications during 2013-2020
## 12 Conclusions  
Considerable potential has been demonstrated for using ohmic heating as a replacement to conventional heating methods for many food processing applications. The efficiency and uniform heating of ohmic heating are highly desirable. Ohmic heating should be evaluated as an option for food processes, such as pasteurization, roasting, boiling, cooking, drying, sterilization, peeling, microbiological inhibition, and recovery of polyphenol and antioxidants.  
Most studies have used ohmic heating with success on a laboratory scale. On a similar scale, ohmic heating has potential as a residential appliance for preparing food that has the shorter time advantages of a microwave while improving food quality over a cooktop. Engineers can anticipate research and development of these variable frequency, variable voltage devices. Food scientists will work on optimizing frequency, voltage, and temperature to produce the highest quality of each food product with the optimum sensory perception. Microwave appliances typically offer single button controls for selected foods to control microwave cycling. Ohmic heating appliances can similarly have preprogrammed options for various foods that optimize frequency, voltage, temperature, and duration by the press of a single button.  
Although the ohmic heating process has better retention of nutritional quality, high energy efficiency, etc., higher cost input limits its commercial use on a higher scale. The foods containing fats and oils cannot be processed with ohmic heating because of a lack of electrical conductivity. The deep knowledge of effects of electric field on mass transfer properties, cold spot determination, and overall process design is prerequisite to establish industrial processes. Thus, it can be deduced that ohmic heating has a prospective for becoming the most important food processing technology of the future.  
Scaling of ohmic heating devices to replace large vats used in industry will require food science and engineering research to determine any size limitations of ohmic heating and apply new electrode designs and configurations. In the future, instead of a food processor purchasing a vat with a water jacket for heating, the vat may have built-in electrodes for ohmic heating.  
Conceptualization, Z.T.A. and A.B.A.; methodology, A.R.S.A.-H. and A.P.-S.; funding: A.P.-S.; validation and formal analysis, D.G.W.; investigation, A.B.A. and A.P.-S., writing original draft preparation, Z.T.A., A.B.A. and A.P.-S. Writing--review and editing, A.R.S.A.-H. and D.G.W. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
**Funding:** Authors would like to thank the funding support from National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Discovery Grant Programme, Grant number RGPIN-2018-04735 to [PERSON].  
**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.  
**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable  
**Data Availability Statement:** All data are reported in this manuscript.  
**Acknowledgments:** The authors would like to thank the Food Science Department, Agriculture College, University of Basrah.  
**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.