Abstract
The food industry is continuously evolving through the application of innovative tools and ingredients towards more effective, safe, natural and ecofriendly solutions to satisfy the demands of the costumers. In this context, natural sources (i.e., leaves, seeds, peels or unused pulp) can entail a valuable source of compounds, such as essential oils (EOs), with recognized antioxidant and antimicrobial properties that can be used as natural additives in packaging applications. The current trend is the incorporation of EOs into diverse kinds of biodegradable materials, such as edible films, thus developing active packaging systems with improved preservation properties that can offer benefits to both the food and packaging industry by reducing food waste and improving the management of packaging waste. EOs may be added into the packaging material as free or encapsulated molecules, where, especially this last option, has been revealed as very promising. The addition of these lipophilic compounds provides to the end-product various bioactivities of interest, which can eventually extend the shelf-life of the product by preventing food spoilage. Pairing biodegradable packaging with EOs extracted from natural agro-industrial by-products can lead to a more sustainable food industry. Recent knowledge and advances on this issue will be reviewed in the present work.
Highlights
Packaging is essential for protecting food products from the environment and is intended to ensure food safety at the same time that industrial and consumer requirements are satisfied [1]
essential oils (EOs) have been demonstrated to exert different biological activities antioxidant and antimicrobial properties are the most highlighted. They could prevent the deterioration caused by oxidation and microbial spoilage in food products
Several studies have evaluated the effectiveness of using EOs, as part of the active packaging material, in very different foods matrices
Summary
Packaging is essential for protecting food products from the environment and is intended to ensure food safety at the same time that industrial and consumer requirements are satisfied [1]. Many different EOs have been characterized, even though the chemical profile depends on the species, the collection area and season or the extraction solvents and techniques Their physical properties prompt their use in the food industry since they contain volatile aroma compounds, they are commonly liquid and colorless at room temperature, they are lipophilic and they can create emulsions with hydrophilic solvents. When producing biofilms, hydrophilic matrices are usually used (for increasing water vapor permeability), formed by protein or polysaccharides polymers that serve as a base on which to incorporate other substances such as lipid components [18] For this purpose, the chosen materials should be of low viscosity, with high hygroscopicity and emulsifying capacity, low reactivity, low cost and with no effect on organoleptic properties of the processed food [19,20]. The methodology applied restricted bibliography to the last 5–10 years and the search of information followed the final structure of the manuscript using different key words such as “EOs”, “active packaging” or “food applications”
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