Millet Bars-Healthier Alternative to Cereal Bars: A Review

Abstract

The demand for quality nutritious food is growing worldwide, that promote health and wellbeing for consumers and helps in reducing the risk for non-communicable diseases and improve the quality of life. The lifestyle changes of consumers, higher health consciousness and nuclear families has created the food industry to invent and innovate creative products by incorporating functional novel ingredients to enhance the nutrient quality and percent daily value per serving of the product. Millet-based bars are versatile products that can be developed as an alternate to existing cereal-based bars. However, technological constraints of manufacturing millet-based bars can be overcome by adding either hydrocolloids, enzymes, any pre-processed starches or by biofortification, genetic engineering or by introducing additional processing technique like fermentation. Incorporation of millets as major functional ingredient in snack food, especially in snack bar, helps to improve the nutritional attributes of the products and to overcome nutritional deficiencies at large.