RESUMO
BACKGROUND: This article aims to present the results of a literature review on food milling, to identify the most recent uses, types of mills, and new grinding trends. METHODS: For this, a search was made with the keywords "grinding", "milling" and "food" in the Scopus, which yielded 192 articles, 52 of which directly related to food, were analyzed. RESULTS: Contributions were found related to various types of grinding such as cryogenic grinding, nano-scaled grinding, ultrafine and superfine grinding. The authors highlighted the uses of these types of milling in agro-industrial products such as nutmeg (Myristica fragrans), wheat bran (Triticum spp.), ginger (Zingiber officinale), and green tea powder (Camellia sinensis), among others. CONCLUSION: It is observed that engineering texts dealing with theoretical and analytical food milling operations do not emphasize the new trends found. As a complementary part of this study, eight patents related to cryogenic grinding in food were analyzed, identifying uses of this type of grinding in coffee, lipids, lycopene, proteins, grains, and seeds. Besides, a search was carried out to find out commercial suppliers of cryogenic grinding equipment, in which six companies from China with their equipment were identified.
