Active refrigeration technologies for food preservation in humanitarian context – A review

Food preservation is one of the most neglected pillars of food security in humanitarian context. In particular, few preservation practices for both raw and cooked food are in place, due to the lack of appropriate technologies, very limited access to energy, especially electricity, and affordability. This situation is quite common not only in humanitarian settings, but also in all the countries with very limited access to modern forms of energy, like majority of Sub-Saharan Africa and part of Asia. In general, food preservation in areas without access to power grid can be provided through active/passive refrigeration, characterized respectively by the use or not of an energy source such as electricity or fuels to run the refrigeration process. Currently, off-grid active refrigeration technologies have a high potential, but in commercial solutions there are still room for improvement. In such context, this work aims at presenting a comprehensive review of scientific and grey literature on active refrigeration technologies for food preservation and related practices, also describing relevant experiences focused to the implementation of innovative refrigeration systems in humanitarian contexts. In detail, the first part of the work takes in consideration the capability of refrigeration to preserve different types of foods in various boundary conditions. The second part deeply analyses different active refrigeration technologies, comparing the solutions under an economic, technical and social point of view, also reporting some representative experiences within humanitarian projects to demonstrate pros and cons of various possible solutions. In the last part of the work an overall comparison and main recommendations are provided in order to identify the best technology for each specific application context, highlighting at the same time where the need of further research has to be mainly focused.