In the last two decades, consumers have increasingly prioritized the intake of healthy, vegan, and nutritionally valuable foods, turning their attention to the functional food sector [1]. This category includes fermented foods and particularly probiotic foods, which contain live microorganisms that have a potential beneficial effect on health. A daily dose of one billion CFU (colony-forming units) is considered the minimum effective amount to obtain the intended benefit [2].
Probiotics can alleviate lactose intolerance, promote the immune system, reduce serum cholesterol, and control gastrointestinal infections [3]. However, to promote beneficial effects, probiotic microorganisms must survive in order to colonize and maintain metabolic activity in the human intestinal tract [4].
Microencapsulation techniques, which consist of coating and protecting components of interest, have a significant influence on increasing the viability rates of probiotic cells.
Among the many microencapsulation techniques, spray drying is one of the most interesting due to its low costs, large-scale potential, and high stability of cells and metabolic products during drying, if the process and formulation parameters have been properly optimized [5].
The materials used for encapsulation must have certain favorable properties related to the field of application such as food, cosmetic, or pharmaceutical, the type of component to be encapsulated, and the technique used. In the case of probiotics, the encapsulating materials must be compatible with live cells, having the ability to provide maximum protection against environmental conditions (e.g., heat, oxygen, light, and moisture) during production, long-term storage, and gastrointestinal transit [6].
Today, based on the growing attention to a human diet not based on animal proteins, which is unsustainable and can often cause allergies, plant-based coating materials are frequently used for encapsulation. Current studies indeed replace milk proteins with soy proteins as encapsulating material [7-8]. Soy milk is a plant-based beverage that can be used as a fermentation substrate to obtain bacterial biomass for encapsulation; at the same time, it can be used as an encapsulating solution, exploiting its intrinsic characteristics useful for encapsulating bacterial biomass and/or metabolites produced during the fermentation process.
Bibliography
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Temple, N. J. (2022). A rational definition for functional foods: A perspective. Frontiers in Nutrition, 9, 957516.
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D’Alessandro, M., Gottardi, D., Parolin, C., Glicerina, V. T., Vitali, B., Lanciotti, R., & Patrignani, F. (2023). Development and characterization of fermented soy beverages containing encapsulated or non-encapsulated vaginal probiotics. Lwt, 180, 114713.
Tang, C. H., & Li, X. R. (2013). Microencapsulation properties of soy protein isolate and storage stability of the correspondingly spray-dried emulsions. Food Research International, 52(1), 419-428.
