A meta-analysis to evaluate drying performance and quality attributes of fruits and vegetables under novel non-thermal pretreatments

This meta-analysis quantified the effects of freeze-thaw (FT), pulsed electric field (PEF), ultrasound (US), ethanol (ET), cold plasma (CP) pretreatments on the drying time and quality attributes of fruits and vegetables based on percentage change estimation. Meta-analysis revealed significant drying time reductions (13.21–26.68%) across pretreatment technologies (p < 0.05). Similarly, the hardness was also reduced by 11.40–41.61% except for PEF pretreatments. Notably, positive changes in both L* values (3.16%) and ΔE values (−13.30%) were found only in US pretreatments. In addition, the results of subgroup analysis showed that nutritional quality is greatly maintained by CP active water pretreatments, for significantly enhancing total phenol content (18.64%), total flavonoids content (33.12%), ascorbic acid (167.83%), DPPH values (22.63%), and FRAP values (28.98%), respectively. Overall, our results provide theoretical guidance for different researches and provide strong evidence for the feasibility of novel non-thermal pretreatment technologies in practical production.