Abstract
Interest in probiotic foods and ingredients is increasing as consumers become more aware of their potential health benefits. The production of these products often involves the use of dry culture powders, and the techniques used to produce such powders often suffer from significant losses of viable cells during drying or require the use of expensive drying technologies with limited throughput (e.g., freeze drying). In this study, the authors examined whether culture survivability during spray drying could be increased via the treatment of two common protein encapsulants with ultra-high-pressure homogenization (UHPH). Lactobacillus plantarum NRRL B-1927 (also known as ATCC 10241), a probiotic strain, was suspended in either soy protein isolate (SPI) or whey protein isolate (WPI) which had been either treated with UHPH at 150 Mpa or left untreated as a control. The suspensions were then dried using either concurrent-flow spray drying (CCSD), mixed-flow spray drying (MFSD) or freeze drying (FD) and evaluated for cell survivability, particle size, moisture content and water activity. In all cases, UHPH resulted in equal or greater survivability among spray dried cultures, showed reductions in particle size measures and, except for one marginal case (CCFD SPI), significantly reduced the moisture content of the dried powders. The combination of these findings strongly suggests that UHPH could allow probiotic powder manufacturers to replace freeze drying with spray drying while maintaining or increasing product quality.
Highlights
As consumers become more aware of the contribution of gut microbiota to human health, the market for probiotic foods and supplements is growing significantly [1]
This study aimed to examine the effect that subjecting two protein-based encapsulants (SPI and whey protein isolate (WPI)) to ultra-high-pressure homogenization (UHPH) would have on the survivability of probiotic cultures during drying techniques commonly used to produce probiotic powders and to determine whether the magnitude of the effect on that process would differ between the two
UHPH provides interesting potential to improve the encapsulating ability of protein isolates during spray drying, reducing particle sizes, moisture content and improving survivability
Summary
As consumers become more aware of the contribution of gut microbiota to human health, the market for probiotic foods and supplements is growing significantly [1]. While freeze drying is used for such preservation, owing to its exceptional ability to preserve cell viability, several factors make it less than ideal, including the length of time needed for drying, the discontinuous nature of the process and the high cost of the process. Though these shortcomings are not as critical when producing cultures for the inoculation of foods for. Foods 2019, 8, 689 fermentation, if the goal is to fortify a food with high levels of viable probiotic bacteria, or create a nutritional supplement, they can be significant [4] Another method of preserving probiotic cultures that has been investigated is spray drying. Several authors have reported the microencapsulation of probiotics using CC spray drying [10,11], the effect of MX spray drying on the quality of probiotic powders has not been investigated in detail
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