Guest Column: Latest developments in the area of Nutraceuticals manufacturing

The nutraceutical industry is experiencing its well-deserved growth in today’s pandemic scenario and will continue to strike gold in the years ahead as covid management approaches being promoted from various platforms and people’s perspective towards plant-based remedies is changing. With new advancements in researches, we can even see an exponential rise in development of technology-based operations in this area in recent years.

Conventional ways of manufacturing nutraceutical and food related products resulting in lowered efficacy and production yield is one of the biggest concerns faced by nutraceutical industry over the ages. Looking at the rising demand for nutraceutical products and functional foods, it is very essential to adopt new manufacturing techniques which can preserve the characteristics, efficacy and boost bioavailability of the final product.

Discussed ahead are some of those technology-based latest developments in manufacturing of nutraceuticals which are causing wonders in nutraceutical and food processing industries.

1. Ultrasound-assisted extraction:

This is a non-thermal method which hastens the mass transfer through plant materials at high intensity and gives information about different physicochemical properties such as quality of eggs, wine fermentation, milk coagulation, etc at low intensity. In addition to this, this method also prevents pathogen contamination in the plant-based formulations. Ultrasound is also been used while preparing colloidal nano-emulsions giving nano-sized bioactives which are highly bioavailable, stable and also characterised by control release efficiency in targeted human tissues. 

2. Hydrostatic pressure-based production:

This process is characterised by the application of pressure (up to 200 Mpa) leading to inactivation of microorganisms in plant material. By increasing the permeability of plant cells, it allows the faster diffusion of the bioactive compounds in the phase transition. This technique not only aids the faster solubilization but also retains the natural colour, taste and texture of plant material/food. One of the highly effective techniques which make use of supercritical carbon dioxide above its critical pressure is highly selective and employed in recovering fragrances from natural sources, extraction of selective flavonoids, etc.

3. Pulse electric field and high voltage electrical discharge method:

By causing the electroporation of the plant material, pulse electric field method is employed for the mass transfer through plant material at accelerated rate. This method not only enhances the recovery of active phytoconstituents but also preserves nutrients of various food materials.

In high voltage electrical discharge method, food ingredients are disrupted by applying short pulses. It is very similar to ohmic heating which carries out pasteurization and sterilization of shear sensitive plant materials and foods by keeping the food ingredient between two electrodes in the chamber and passing alternating electric current through the circuit.

4. Electro-osmotic dewatering:

This method is an energy efficient technique and best alternative to radio-frequency drying (water evaporation below 80 degrees followed by drying of food matrix by uniform heating). This drying technique is gaining much popularity in nutraceutical industry in recent times. This method uses about 5-30 volts of electric field to remove the moisture from plant material/food. The method can result in around 80% reduction in carbon emission which makes this technique superior to conventional thermal drying methods.

5. Cold plasma treatment:

Being used for microbial inactivation in the final product, this technique is emerging as a novel technology for food and nutraceutical industry. This method is commonly used in the production of modified starches by altering their physical and chemical properties. In addition to sterilizing the sensitive plat materials, this method is emerging as a method of preservation of food material and as an alternative to various conventional techniques. A number of researches are going on in this modern technique to make it more reliable and cost effective.

6. Nano-encapsulation:

This method is characterised by production of micro and nano-sized molecules of active phytoconstituents. It is a very modern approach toward increasing stability, solubility and bioavailability of the bioactive in the formulation. Nano-encapsulation not only preserves the efficacy of bioactive but also avoids its degradation during processing and storage, conceals undesirable tastes, control/prolong the release etc. Encapsulation techniques like emulsions, solid lipid nanoparticles, synthetic and biopolymer-based encapsulations, etc are commonly being used in recent development of nutraceutical products.

Techniques such as ultrasound-assisted extraction, pulse electric field, high voltage electrical discharge method, radio-frequency drying are commonly being used in the nutraceutical industry. There are still some researches required in the field of emerging methods like electro-osmotic dewatering, cold plasma treatment and nano-encapsulation to investigate the unknown effects of these techniques on plant materials and biological matrices. Impact of these methods on nutritional value, application, sensory characteristics and shelf-life of nutraceutical formulation are need to be investigated to develop a versatile method of production for Nutraceuticals and food related products.

Dr. R.B Smarta is the Managing Director of Interlink Consultancy.

References-
1. Abhay Menona , Tonderai Reuben Mashyamombeb , Erdogan Kaygenb , Mina Sadat Mortazavi Nasiric and Valentina Stojceska_Electro-osmosis dewatering as an energy efficient technique for drying food materials_https://bura.brunel.ac.uk/bitstream/2438/18115/1/FullText.pdf_accessed on 09.04.2021

4. Charis M. Galanakis_Functionality of Food Components and Emerging Technologies_https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7826514/_accessed on 09.04.2021