An overview of microencapsulation in the food industry: opportunities, challenges, and innovations

While consumer trends are leading to a surge of functional foods, the addition of bioactive compounds to food matrixes presents a series of challenges such as lack of stability or unpleasant organoleptic characteristics. Microencapsulation is not only a useful tool to overcome them, but it also allows the development of products with improved features that allow the differentiation from competitors and personalization of products. Despite consumers increasingly recognize the benefits of technological solutions, the healthy living and clean labeling trends are also posing challenges for microencapsulation. Thus, considering the limited range of suitable encapsulant materials allowed for food, material selection is becoming the main challenge that formulators face. In this review, opportunities, challenges, and innovations of microencapsulation in the food industry have been discussed. In addition, an overview on microencapsulation, reasons for microencapsulation, its techniques, and examples of applications in the food industry have also been provided. Graphic abstract