Although several published works show the multitude of bioactive properties of these compounds, ensuring their use as bioactive ingredients in food, they present inherent stability issues needing to be solved. However, considerable research is presently ongoing to overcome this problem, making viable the development of new products to be launched in the market.

a Consumers search for food with functional characteristics beyond its nutritional properties. Thus, the concept of functional food has become a hot topic, allowing us to obtain additional health benefits, including disease prevention. In this context, plants are recognized as sources of a wide range of bioactives, including phenolic compounds. Herein, rosemary aqueous extract was used as a functional ingredient for cottage cheese, after proving that it possesses both higher content of phenolic compounds and antioxidant activity, comparatively with the corresponding hydroethanolic extract. However, a decrease of bioactivity was observed for the cheese samples enriched with the extracts in free form after seven days under storage. Therefore, in order to preserve the antioxidant activity, the rosemary aqueous extract was efficiently microencapsulated by using an atomization/coagulation technique. Overall, the introduction of both free and microencapsulated extracts provided bioactivity that was better preserved with microencapsulated extracts without changing the nutritional value of cottage cheese.

In this work, hydroalcoholic extracts of two mushrooms species, Suillus luteus (L.:Fries) (Sl) and Cropinopsis atramentaria (Bull.) (Ca), were studied for their synergistic antioxidant effect and their viability as functional food ingredients tested by incorporation into a food matrix (cottage cheese). In a first step, the individual extracts and a combination of both showing synergistic effects (Sl:Ca, 1:1) were microencapsulated by spray-drying using maltodextrin as the encapsulating material.The incorporation of free extracts resulted in products with higher initial antioxidant activity (t0) but declining after 7 days (t7), which was associated with their degradation.However, the cottage cheese enriched with the microencapsulated extracts, that have revealed a lower activity at initial time, showed an increase at t7. This improvement can be explained by an effective protection provided by the microspheres together with a sustained release. Analyses performed on the studied cottage cheese samples showed the maintenance of the nutritional properties and no colour modifications were noticed.

Globally, there is a trend for healthy food products, preferably incorporating natural bioactive ingredients, replacing synthetic additives. From previous screening studies, extracts of Foeniculum vulgare Mill. (fennel) and Matricaria recutita L. (chamomile) maintained nutritional properties and improved the antioxidant activity of cottage cheese. Nevertheless, this effect was limited to 7 days. Accordingly, aqueous extracts of these plants were microencapsulated in alginate and incorporated into cottage cheese to achieve an extended bioactivity. Plain cottage cheese, and cheese functionalized by direct addition of free decoctions, were prepared and compared. Independently of plant species, "functionalization type" factor did not show a significant effect on the nutritional parameters, as also confirmed in the linear discriminant analysis, where these parameters were not selected as discriminating variables. Furthermore, samples functionalized with microencapsulated extracts showed higher antioxidant activity after the 7th day, thereby demonstrating that the main purpose of this experimental work was achieved.

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