Ohmic Heating Patents: Who Leads, Where the Gaps Are 2026
- 36.1% concentration. The top 5 of 72 ranked assignees together hold 53 of the 147 records in scope — a third of the field sits with a handful of filers.
- Filing has cooled since 2017. The peak year was 2017 at 9 filings; by the 2022 midpoint annual output had fallen to 1, and no ranked assignee logged a filing in the latest year.
- Claims cluster in electric heating circuitry, not food science. H05B (electric heating & lighting circuits) covers 30.6% of records, ahead of A23L food & beverage classes at 20.4%.
What the ohmic heating patent record actually shows
Ohmic heating passes electric current directly through food to generate heat volumetrically, and the patent record around it sits at the intersection of electrical engineering and food safety. Across 147 records published between 2015 and 2026, filing activity peaked early in the window and has since thinned to a trickle, which is consistent with a technology whose core electrode and circuit approaches were staked out before the corpus’s most active years. The claim language leans toward electric heating circuitry classes rather than food-specific processing classes, suggesting that much of the differentiation being patented is in how current is delivered and controlled, not in the food matrix itself.
Coverage runs to the 2026-07-31 cut-off, but any trend read for the final year or two understates real activity, since publication typically lags filing by around 18 months. The concentration figures and IPC shares below should be read against the full 147-record denominator, not against the ranked-assignee subset.
Filing trend and technology composition
Two views of the same 147 records: filings by year, and how those records distribute across IPC subclasses. Because a single record can carry more than one IPC class, the subclass shares add up to more than the record total — each share is still read against all 147 records.
A front-loaded filing curve
Annual filings ran as high as 9 in 2017, the peak of the window, then declined toward a midpoint of 1 filing in 2022. Read the final year or two as understated rather than as evidence of a hard stop, given typical publication lag.
Electric heating circuitry dominates the classification mix
H05B (electric heating & lighting circuits) appears in 30.6% of records, well ahead of A23L (foods & non-alcoholic beverages) at 20.4% and G01N (material analysis & testing) at 14.3%. Smaller but present threads include G02F, C10L, A23B, G02B and A61B, each under 11% of records — these are the classes worth checking individually for open claim space rather than assuming they are saturated.
Shares are the percentage of the 147 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Ohmic Heating in Food Processing with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about ohmic heating in food processing and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaA representative filing and the most-cited prior art
US9259121B2 — Ohmic heating packet
A hermetically-sealed, ohmic heating packet for storing, heating and sterilizing food and beverage items, built from a multilayer laminate with interior and exterior polymer layers around an intermediate metallic foil layer. Conductive tags on the packet's exterior connect to interior electrodes through reverse-patched sidewall regions, a configuration designed to stop current leaking into the metallic foil and causing a short circuit during heating.Filed by Ohio State Innovation Foundation, published 2016-02-16.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US7354440B2 | Electrosurgical instrument and method of use | 1,444 |
| 2 | US20080147062A1 | Electrosurgical instrument and method of use | 381 |
| 3 | US6011995A | Endovascular device for hyperthermia and angioplasty and method for using the same | 266 |
| 4 | US5621845A | Apparatus for electrode heating of earth for recovery of subsurface volatiles and semi-volatiles | 197 |
| 5 | US5586213A | Ionic contact media for electrodes and soil in conduction heating | 95 |
| 6 | US20080045879A1 | Methods and Devices for Thermal Treatment | 82 |
| 7 | US20040120383A1 | Non-destructive testing system and method using current flow thermography | 61 |
| 8 | WO2006004595A2 | Methods and devices for thermal treatment | 59 |
| 9 | US20050171535A1 | Electrosurgical instrument and method of use | 55 |
| 10 | WO1989000384A1 | Apparatus for heating electrically conductive flowable media and methods of use of such apparatus | 39 |
Citation counts favour older documents by construction — a searched corpus accumulates citations over time, so high counts here mark influence within the corpus, not current commercial relevance.
Each row carries its publication number; clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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Three read-throughs from the concentration, trend and classification data above, aimed at where a new applicant should and should not expect open ground.
A third of the field sits with a small group
The leader holds 17 records outright, with the fifth-place assignee at 7 and tenth place at 5 — a steep drop-off rather than a gradual one. That shape typically means the foundational electrode and circuit configurations are already claimed by a handful of filers, and new entrants need to design around those specific mechanisms rather than the general concept of ohmic heating.
Filing has gone quiet across the ranked leaders
None of the assignees with the strongest historical positions logged a filing in the latest year on record. Combined with the drop from a 2017 peak of 9 filings to a 2022 midpoint of 1, this points to a field where the active filing window has largely closed for the incumbents — which can mean either a mature core technology or an opening for a differently positioned entrant.
The claims are electrical, not culinary
H05B electric heating circuitry outweighs A23L food and beverage classification by a meaningful margin, and G01N material testing (14.3%) outranks A23B food preservation (6.1%) too. Applicants entering from a food-science angle should expect to be reading circuit and testing claims as much as food-processing ones.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to ohmic heating in food processing, with the prior art for and against each one.
Who holds the ground, and where it thins out
The 72-company ranking is the complete set the dataset returns for this search — not a top-50 or top-100 cut — and it drops off sharply after the leading names.
One filer well ahead of the rest
The leading assignee's 17 records are more than double the fifth-place total of 7, making it the single most important name to check before filing a circuit or electrode claim in this space.
A tight cluster just below the leader
The gap from fifth to tenth place is small — 7 records down to 5 — indicating a group of similarly sized filers rather than a second dominant player. Their combined weight (top 10 at 55.1% of all 147 records) matters more than any one of their individual positions.
A long tail of single- or few-filing entrants
Beyond the top 10, the ranking spreads across many assignees with small counts each, including academic and utility-scale filers alongside food and electrical firms. That tail is where freedom-to-operate searches should focus, since individual blocking positions there are narrower.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| May Ruben Tech | 0 | — |
| Acreo | 0 | — |
| InstaHeat AG | 0 | — |
| INDAL CHEM GROUP | 0 | — |
| Electricite de France | 0 | — |
| BECKSWIFT | 0 | — |
| Unilever N.V. | 0 | — |
| The Boeing Co | 0 | — |
Where to take this next
The landscape above is a starting map, not a freedom-to-operate opinion. Two directions make sense depending on what you are trying to decide.
Check a specific claim against the leader's portfolio
If you are designing an electrode or circuit configuration, the leading assignee's 17 records are the first place to check for overlap before committing engineering time.
Explore assignee portfolios in EurekaTrack whether filing actually restarts
With annual filings down to 1 at the 2022 midpoint and nothing from ranked leaders in the latest year, a fresh pull closer to real time will show whether this is a pause or a settled ceiling.
Set up trend monitoring in EurekaCommon questions on ohmic heating patents
Ohmic heating passes alternating electric current directly through a food product, using the food's own electrical resistance to generate heat volumetrically rather than through an external heat source. Because the core innovation is often in how current is delivered, controlled and made safe — electrode design, circuit configuration, leakage prevention — a large share of the patent record classifies under electric heating circuitry (H05B) rather than purely food-processing classes. In this dataset H05B covers 30.6% of the 147 records in scope, ahead of the food and beverage class A23L at 20.4%.
The dataset ranks 72 assignees by record count, with the single leader holding 17 of the 147 records in scope. The top 5 assignees combined hold 53 records, 36.1% of the field, and the top 10 hold 81 records, 55.1% — a concentrated top tier followed by a long tail of smaller filers. Rather than naming a fixed list here, check the ranking table on this page directly, since positions can shift as new records publish.
Not on the evidence in this dataset. Filings peaked in 2017 at 9 for the year, fell to 1 by the 2022 midpoint, and none of the ranked leading assignees recorded a filing in the most recent year. Recent-year figures should be read cautiously, though, since publication typically lags actual filing by around 18 months, so the last year or two in any chart will understate true activity.
The classification data shows electric heating circuitry heavily claimed relative to more specific process-control areas: cold-spot verification sensing, electrode material degradation control, aseptic processing integration and conductivity variation compensation each show thinner representation than the core H05B and A23L classes. That does not guarantee freedom to operate, but it flags where a full prior-art search is more likely to find room rather than a dense thicket.
Citation counts in this corpus, including the most-cited records shown here, favour older documents simply because they have had more time to accumulate citations from later filings. A high citation count marks influence within the searched set of documents, not necessarily current commercial importance or validity strength. Treat the citation table as a map of historical reference points, and check filing dates and current legal status separately before drawing conclusions about relevance today.
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Disclaimer. This page is generated from Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent and scientific-literature records, and is provided for general information and reference only.
Patent data carries inherent limitations: recent filings (typically the most recent 18–24 months) are under-counted due to standard publication lag; counts may be reported at either a patent-family or a patent-record basis and are not always directly comparable; classification, applicant-name, and citation data may contain errors, duplicates, or omissions; and the underlying search query defines and constrains the scope shown. As a result, the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing on this page constitutes an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate, or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial, investment, or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Any patent, commercial, or strategic decision should be verified independently and reviewed with qualified patent, legal, and domain professionals. Patsnap makes no warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose of the information presented.
Machine translation. Assignee and organisation names originally recorded in Chinese, Japanese or Korean have been rendered into English by an AI translation step so that the tables stay readable. These renderings are best-effort and may not match a company’s registered English name; the original name is what the underlying patent record carries, and it is what any Eureka query launched from this page uses.