Within this 68-record dataset, one assignee — a university-linked research group — leads with 22 records, well ahead of the rest of the 14-company ranking. Much of that position comes from repeated co-filing with a Flemish postharvest research centre rather than a single large portfolio filed alone. Below the leader, counts fall quickly: fifth place holds 8 records and tenth place holds just 1, so the field is better described as one strong incumbent plus a long tail of smaller filers than as several evenly matched competitors.

The peak year observed is 2017, with 10 filings, and later years have not matched that level in the raw data. However, publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, so the most recent one to two years in any dataset like this will always look thinner than they eventually turn out to be once pending applications publish. There are not enough complete recent years in this set to state a reliable growth rate, so treat the recent-year numbers as a floor, not a final answer.

A23B, the core food-preservation class, covers 83.8% of the 68 records in scope, making it by far the most crowded area — most oxygen-setpoint and basic atmosphere-control claims sit here. Packaging classes B65D and B65B each cover under a fifth of records, and control- and sensing-related classes such as G05D, A01J, F24F and G01N each sit at 5.9% or below. That gap suggests instrumentation, control-system integration and disorder-detection methods are comparatively open relative to the core storage method itself.