MicroZap Technology

History of the Science

The client, a major player of the food industry headquartered in the U.S, was using preservatives in its tortillas to guarantee their safety and shelf-life. 

Although this company was using premium ingredients, consumers started to be bothered by the presence of controversial additives in their daily diet. So our customer wanted to replace them with a log reduction process that can avoid the use of preservatives. 

The client's requirements were clear,  they needed a continuous and fast solution to treat the tortillas at 65 °C during 2 minutes, inside their packaging, in order to pasteurize the product, while preserving its organoleptic properties. 

In collaboration with Texas Tech University, we first engineered a microwave tunnel at pilot scale, that can treat up to 35 kg of packaged tortillas per hour, while keeping the integrity of the product and the plastic packaging. The successful results have shown preservative free tortillas with shelf life extensions equal to tortillas with preservatives while achieving a greater than 3-log reduction of mold. 

The industrial line is designed to pasteurize up to 1100 kg of packaged tortillas per hour, thanks to a 100% electrical microwave processing tunnel.