5 - Improving the shelf-life of food products by nano/micro-encapsulated ingredients

Abstract

Every year, many people suffer from diseases due to consuming contaminated or spoiled food, and hence, food preservation has always been a major global issue for societies. Although a high number of modern and traditional approaches are broadly applied to preserve fresh and processed foods throughout the world, looking for alternative procedures ensuring the safe preservation of foods for a long time period is an undeniable necessity. This is particularly the case where the quality and properties of food or health of consumers are affected by current preservation techniques such as packaging or synthetic preservatives. Today, researches are looking at the substitutions of packaging techniques, and developing the unique nontoxic preservatives that, with minimum levels, can improve the freshness and shelf-life of foods, without any significant influence on the characteristics of food. Protective ingredients, such as phytosterols, phenolic compounds, and herbal or plant extracts are among them. Meanwhile, the drawback of these ingredients is mainly attributed to their instability versus detrimental environmental circumstances, reducing their suitability to be used on an industrial scale. Concerning these issues, encapsulation is a developing technology that could be utilized in the food industry to protect the bioactive ingredients and allow their controlled delivery within the food matrix, ensuring a sustained presence and activity of the preservative ingredients during prolonged storage of the product. Therefore, in this chapter, the main types of food spoilage, namely chemical and microbial spoilages, are introduced, followed by explaining the significance of different encapsulated ingredients on limiting or preventing the major spoilage routs, as well as comparing the performance of encapsulated preservatives with free ones. In addition, the most common encapsulation approaches and encapsulants used for entrapping bioactive ingredients have been listed according to the recent studies.