Innovations constantly appear in food packaging, always aiming at creating a more
efficient quality preservation system while improving foods attractiveness and
marketability. The utilization of renewable sources for packaging materials, such as
hydrocolloids from biological origin, is one of the main trends of the food packaging
industry. Edible coatings have been considered as one of the potential technologies
that can be used to increase the storability of foods and to improve the existent
packaging technology, helping to ensure microbial safety and preservation of food
from the influence of external factors.
In view of these advantages concerning the application of edible coating solutions,
recent developments have been achieved regarding the utilization of new materials.
Work has been developed on the application of galactomannans, chitosan, Policaju,
and collagen-based coatings on fruits (1, 2), cheese (3, 4) and fish (5), with the
incorporation in some cases of antimicrobials and antifungals (5,7). Recently, the layerby-
layer technique was used to apply these bio-based coatings as a nanolayer in fruits
such as pears and mangoes (8, 9) using materials such as chitosan, lysozyme, pectin
and k-carrageenan.
Globally, results showed that the application of bio-based coatings on food products
lead to the improvement of the quality and to the increase of shelf-life of food
products. It is viewed that in a near future tailored edible packaging solutions based on
natural biopolymers can be applied to selected foods, partially replacing nonbiodegradable/
non-edible plastics.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
