Anjaly Shanker M Sandeep Singh Rana ^*

• School of Biosciences and Technology, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, India

Consumption of plant-based food is constantly on an increasing incline and follows an augmented trend owing to their nutritive, functional, and energy potential. Different bioactive fractions like phenols, flavanols, etc. contribute highly to the nutritive profile of food and are known to have sensitivity towards higher temperatures. This limits the application of traditional thermal treatments in plant products and has paved a way for the advancement of innovative and non-thermal techniques like pulsed electric field, microwave, ultrasound, cold plasma, high-pressure processing etc. Among these techniques, cold plasma would be an operative choice in plantbased applications due to their higher efficacy, greenness, chemical exclusivity, and the degree of quality retention achieved. The efficiency of the plasma process in ensuring the bioactive potential is dependent on several factors like feeding gas, input voltage, exposure time, pressure, current flow etc. This review explains in detail about the optimization of process parameters of cold plasma technique ensuring the higher extractability or retention of total phenols as well the antioxidant potential. Response surface methodology (RSM) is one of the common techniques involved in the optimization of these course factors. It also covers the convention of artificial intelligence-based methods like artificial neural networks (ANN), genetic algorithm (GA) etc. in evaluating the data on process parameters. The review aims at including a critical discussion on the positives of each optimization tool in finding the optimum process parameters in ensuring the higher phenol or antioxidant activity. The ascendancy of these techniques was mentioned in the studies regarding the fruit, vegetables, and their products and can also be applied in other food products also.