Fruit and vegetable snacks as carriers of probiotics and bioactive compounds: a review

BUSTOS, ANA YANINA; FONT, GRACIELA; TARANTO, MARÍA PÍA

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF FOOD SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

WILEY-BLACKWELL PUBLISHING, INC

Año: 2023 p. 1 - 13

0950-5423

Vegetable and fruit snacks emerge as an innovative non-dairy functional food of probiotic carriers and avaluable alternative to consumers with dietary restrictions. However, enriching snacks with probiotics ischallenging as several factors may affect cell viability making it difficult to maintain adequate microbialdoses at consumption time. This article aimed to review the most recent advances in the design of probiotic fruit and vegetable snacks to provide the current state of knowledge on this cutting-edge topic. Inparticular, the technologies applied to introduce probiotics into the food matrix, classical and novel drying methods, and strategies to improve microbial survival during processing, storage and gastrointestinalpassage, are discussed. Most of the published works report bacterial counts above 7 log cfu g1 in snacks,which is a proper dose of probiotics to promote health benefits. However, many of these studies did notevaluate the survival rate during storage or considered short periods. The design of fruit- or vegetablebased snacks enriched with probiotics appears to be a worthwhile strategy at laboratory scale but furtherstudies to validate results both at pilot and industrial scale are necessary