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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Fascinating.

So why exactly is this not widespread now?

Is it too new, too costly, or does it diminish the taste/texture more than the slides indicate?

Or is it just not necessary, e.g. most people either eat their food before it goes bad, or forget about it for so long that this wouldn't make much a difference anyways?

I have a hard time believing that subjecting, say, a crisp green pepper to pressure high enough to disrupt all bacteria wouldn't noticeably alter the texture (perhaps similar to how freezing does)... or just as bad, make it implode and rupture. (Although I guess you could poke a small hole in produce with hollow interiors.)

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The equipment is very expensive. The packaging of the items themselves can have a higher cost also. Many items don't really taste noticeably different after a temperature-based pasteurization so for those, the increased cost isn't worth it.

Pasteurization is necessary for most packaged food products to be licensed for sale.

The big apps for this right now seem to be juice products. A heat-pasteurized juice is noticeably inferior to an HPP one.

You would typically not pasteurize an unpackaged product. You don't have to pasteurize a bell pepper.

It's not that rare now. I have seen some mainstream dairies using it for particular products distributed in EU. And many veggie smoothie brands use it in the UK. E.g. Savse.

I would like to see studies comparing it to pasteurization as I said in another comment. I believe pasteurization creates some denatured proteins and weird peptides due to heat shock that might not be very healthy. It'd be interesting to see whether HPP is better in this regard.

I'm no expert, but it seems like it would have to be better, no?

Pressure at these levels could damage cell walls but not break apart molecules the way heat does, right?

That's the claim, and I tend to believe it's true. But I'd like to see some convincing data.

It’s been widely used in the soft drinks and dairy sector for at least 5 years now. I was involved in a UK-based “cold pressed” juice business and we used HPP to extend shelf life of our drinks from 2-3 days to 20-25 days (depending on the ingredients). This was 2013-2015 and there were already facilities who would batch HPP products for companies like ours.

The CAPEX is expensive and it's a batch process. If you can scrounge up enough capital to overcome that hurdle though, the products are usually an instant hit locally.

We in the developing markets are usually stuck with recombined juices and UHT milk, so we get easily blown-away by how better these things taste.

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