Recent pathogen incidents have forced food industry to seek for alternative processes in postharvest pasteurization of agricultural commodities. Radio frequency (RF) heating has been used as one alternative treatment to replace chemical fumigation and other conventional thermal methods since it is relatively easy to apply and leaves no chemical residues. RF technology transfers electromagnetic energy into large bulk volume of the products to provide a fast and volumetric heating. There are two types of RF technology commonly applied in lab and industry to generate the heat energy: free running oscillator and 50-Ω systems. Several reviews have been published to introduce the application of RF heating in food processing. However, few reviews have a comprehensive summary of RF treatment for pasteurizing agricultural products. The objective of this review was to introduce the developments in the RF pasteurization of agricultural commodities and to present future directions of the RF heating applications. While the recent developments in the RF pasteurization were presented, thermal death kinetics of targeted pathogens as influenced by water activity, pathogen species and heating rates, non-thermal effects of RF heating, combining RF heating with other technologies for pasteurization, RF heating uniformity improvements using computer simulation and development of practical RF pasteurization processes were also focused. This review is expected to provide a comprehensive understanding of RF pasteurization for agricultural products and promote the industrial-scale applications of RF technology with possible process protocol optimization purposes.

最近的病原体事件迫使食品工业在农产品的收获后巴氏灭菌法中寻求替代方法。射频（RF）加热已被用作替代化学熏蒸和其他常规热方法的一种替代处理方法，因为它相对易于使用并且不会留下任何化学残留物。射频技术将电磁能转移到大体积的产品中，以提供快速且定量的加热。实验室和工业中通常使用两种类型的RF技术来产生热能：自由运行的振荡器和50Ω系统。已经发表了一些评论，介绍了射频加热在食品加工中的应用。但是，很少有评论对用于农产品巴氏消毒的RF处理进行了全面的总结。这次审查的目的是介绍农产品射频巴氏灭菌技术的发展，并介绍射频加热应用的未来方向。虽然介绍了射频巴氏灭菌的最新进展，但受水活动，病原体种类和加热速率，射频加热的非热效应影响的目标病原体的热死亡动力学，将射频加热与其他技术进行巴氏灭菌相结合，提高了射频加热均匀性使用计算机仿真和开发实际的射频巴氏灭菌工艺也受到关注。预期该审查将提供对农产品射频巴氏杀菌的全面理解，并促进射频技术在工业规模的应用，并可能进行过程协议优化。