There is a pressing need for edible delivery systems to encapsulate, protect, and release bioactive lipids within the food, medical, and pharmaceutical industries. The fact that these delivery systems must be edible puts constraints on the type of ingredients and processing operations that can be used to create them. Emulsion technology is particularly suited for the design and fabrication of delivery systems for encapsulating bioactive lipids. This review provides a brief overview of the major bioactive lipids that need to be delivered within the food industry (for example, ω-3 fatty acids, carotenoids, and phytosterols), highlighting the main challenges to their current incorporation into foods. We then provide an overview of a number of emulsion-based technologies that could be used as edible delivery systems by the food and other industries, including conventional emulsions, multiple emulsions, multilayer emulsions, solid lipid particles, and filled hydrogel particles. Each of these delivery systems could be produced from food-grade (GRAS) ingredients (for example, lipids, proteins, polysaccharides, surfactants, and minerals) using simple processing operations (for example, mixing, homogenizing, and thermal processing). For each type of delivery system, we describe its structure, preparation, advantages, limitations, and potential applications. This knowledge can be used to facilitate the selection of the most appropriate emulsion-based delivery system for specific applications.

The Institute of Food Technologists has issued this Scientific Status Summary to update readers on the applications of nanotechnology in the food industry.

In recent years, a number of studies have produced evidence to suggest that consuming carotenoids may provide a variety of health benefits including a reduced incidence of a number of cancers, reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, and improved eye health. Evolving evidence on the health benefits of several carotenoids has sparked interest in incorporating more carotenoids into functional food products. Unfortunately, the same structural attributes of carotenoids that are thought to impart health benefits also make these compounds highly susceptible to oxidation. Given the susceptibility of carotenoids to degradation, particularly once they have been extracted from biological tissues, it is important to understand the major mechanisms of oxidation in order to design delivery systems that protect these compounds when they are used as functional food ingredients. This article reviews current understanding of the oxidation mechanisms by which carotenoids are degraded, including pathways induced by heat, light, oxygen, acid, transition metal, or interactions with radical species. In addition, several carotenoid delivery systems are evaluated for their potential to decrease carotenoid degradation in functional food products.

There have been major advances in the design and fabrication of structured delivery systems for the encapsulation of nutraceutical and functional food components. A wide variety of delivery systems is now available, each with its own advantages and disadvantages for particular applications. This review begins by discussing some of the major nutraceutical and functional food components that need to be delivered and highlights the main limitations to their current utilization within the food industry. It then discusses the principles underpinning the rational design of structured delivery systems: the structural characteristics of the building blocks; the nature of the forces holding these building blocks together; and, the different ways of assembling these building blocks into structured delivery systems. Finally, we review the major types of structured delivery systems that are currently available to food scientists: lipid-based (simple, multiple, multilayer, and solid lipid particle emulsions); surfactant-based (simple micelles, mixed micelles, vesicles, and microemulsions) and biopolymer-based (soluble complexes, coacervates, hydrogel droplets, and particles). For each type of delivery system we describe its preparation, properties, advantages, and limitations.