**1. Introduction**

### *1.1. Food Away from Home (FAFH) vs. Food Packaging Technology*

The consumption of food away from home (FAFH) is constantly rising in the whole industrialized society because of the increasing need to carry out activities for both children at school and adults at work [1,2]. A rational approach should take in account innovative methods for cooking food stuff and new packaging. Foods are expected to be tasty and healthy even if not cooked at the moment of consumption. A rational design for cooking and store foods could reduce waste and containing food expenditure. Food packaging technology research should help food manufacturers to reach this goal meeting the needs of consumers, the society and the manufacturers, often very different from each other.

While the consumers are oriented to products that match their own lifestyle, the society needs safer and environmentally sustainable products that means major attention also on packaging material, not only on food stuff. On the other hand, the manufacturers are interested in the use of better and more cost-effective packaging materials and technologies to meet the market demand and make profits [3,4].

### *1.2. Food, Energy, Environment Trilemma*

In the next decades, the global community will attend to an increasing of food demand, due to the third world demographic explosion, and the displacement of food crops, due to a change of the land use that will be directed to the biofuel and bioenergy production [5]. A trend is visible in the scientific literature showing the conflict between food production and bioenergy/biofuel production is the so-called "*food, energy, environment trilemma*" [6,7]. One of the possible strategies that should be used to solve this problem is the enhancement of the food transformation efficiency intended as a reduction of waste and, therefore, ageneralreductionoflossesinediblematerialduringfoodmanipulationandconsumption.

 Now larger and medium sized catering and hospitality companies are forced to use new technologies for cooking and storage due to business needs. Maybe in the near future,

small companies, restaurants, and small communities including families will embrace this new "food preparation philosophy" in order to reduce food costs.

The cook–chill processing procedure has been widely used in catering since the early Nineties [8] coming from the practice of serving unused food the day after preparation to avoid waste. This procedure consists in rapid cooling of cooked food to 2–4 ◦C before or after packaging that will be stored at the same temperature until it will be served both hot (by warming at 70 ◦C) or cold.

The current paper presents an overview of the advances in the cook–chill technology developed to increase the shelf-life of foods without loss of their nutritional and organoleptic value.

### **2. The Cook–Chill Technology**

The habit of consuming food is a common practice for households who have access to refrigeration. At the same time, lack of adequate preparation and storage can result in incidents of food poisoning [9]. This can also result in considerable food spoilage which contributes to increasing food wastage.

Companies involved in serving meals have implemented specific technologies of the last two or three decades able to prepare and package meals designed for reheating without loss of taste, flavor and texture. To obtain this result it is strictly necessary to follow a simple protocol that is schematically shown in Figure 1.

**Figure 1.** A block scheme of the principal steps in cook–chill procedure.

### *2.1. Retrieving and Work-Up of Raw Materials*

Choice, storage, handling, and preparation operations of raw materials follow simple hygienic rules principally derived from good sense and coded by administration such as U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) (see legislation paragraph below). The standard quality of starting materials must be as high as possible because it is not going to improve with cooking, so the systematic control on the supplier chain guarantees to keep the quality level.

After selection of raw materials, it is necessary to follow the basic food safety principles, to ensure that the proper temperature and humidity of the starting materials are kept. In addition, in preparing procedures, basic food safety principles have to be applied: separate work surfaces and dedicated utensils should be used for different types of food (fish, meat, poultry and vegetables) to prevent cross-contamination. At the best conditions, food preparation should take place in a separate area from cooking and post-cooking.

Frozen raw materials should be completely thawed out before use, rapid high temperature thawing should be avoided because it can allow the growth of pathogens [10–12] and may leave cold spots at the core of the food. Thawing with microwave ovens is generally not recommended for the same reasons [7,13,14].
