Dairy Foods: Challenges and Opportunities of Microencapsulation Technology in Application to Dairy Foods Symposium

Development of technology driven functional and natural health products has a number of challenges since bioactive ingredients incorporated are unstable to processing with reduced absorption, low bioavailability and reduced shelf life. Encapsulation offers a great potential for protecting and delivering bioactive components and micro-organisms through technology driven products to enhance human health. Encapsulation is the technology of packaging bioactive core materials in miniature capsules that release their contents triggered by various factors such as shear, temperature, enzymes, an pH. The available technologies for microencapsulation can be grouped into two broad categories, one which uses a liquid as a suspending medium (complex coacervation, interfacial and in situ polymerisation or solvent evaporation from emulsions) and one which uses a gas as a suspending medium into which a liquid phase is sprayed (spray-drying or spray-cooling, fluidised-bed coating or coextrusion). Currently available commercial products are based on gel particles, spray-coating, spray-drying, extrusion and emulsions. Other encapsulation techniques such as liposomes, coacervation or molecular inclusion (cyclodextrins) as well as using nano emulsions are not widely available to protect bioactives in the development of technology driven functional dairy foods. This could be either because of cost or the requirement of non-food approved polymers used in the encapsulation. A number of both laboratory and commercial scale equipment had been developed and being used to produce micro and nano scale capsules. A UWS prototype encapsulator which uses a falling film technology capable of producing high capsule production capacity suitable for application on an industrial scale has been developed. This presentation will review the recent developments in relation to the science and technology of encapsulation, challenges and opportunities in the development of innovative functional dairy foods.