Currently, the food industry is investing in the development of more sustainable packaging alternatives that preserve nutritional quality as well as organoleptic traits such as color, taste, smell and texture.
That is why a film was developed by a research group in São Paulo state, Brazil, comprising scientists in the Department of Materials Engineering and Bioprocesses at the State University of Campinas’s School of Chemical Engineering (FEQ-UNICAMP) and the Packaging Technology Center at the Institute of Food Technology (ITAL) of the São Paulo State Department of Agriculture and Supply, also in Campinas.
The film is made of a compound derived from limonene, the main component of citrus fruit peel, and chitosan, a biopolymer derived from the chitin present in exoskeletons of crustaceans. “We focused on limonene because Brazil is one of the world’s largest producers of oranges [if not the largest] and São Paulo is the leading orange-producing state,” said Roniérik Pioli Vieira, a professor at FEQ-UNICAMP.
Limonene has been used before in film for food packaging to enhance conservation thanks to its antoxidant and anti-microbial action, but its performance is impaired by volatility and instability during the packaging manufacturing process, even on a laboratory scale.
“To solve this problem, we came up with the idea of using a derivative of limonene called poly(limonene), which isn’t volatile or particularly unstable,” Vieira said.
Source: agencia.fapesp.br