Advances in efficient extraction of essential oils from spices and its application in food industry: A critical review

Abstract

With the increase of people’s awareness of food safety, it is crucial to find natural and green antimicrobial agents to replace traditional antimicrobial agents. Essential oils of spices (SEOs) are low toxicity or nontoxic, which exhibited antioxidants and antimicrobial activity according to many in vitro and in situ experiments. Spices are widely available and low cost as a plant raw material for the extraction of SEOs. This review summarized highly efficient extraction techniques for SEOs, such as physical field assisted extraction technology, supercritical fluid extraction, and biological-based techniques. Furthermore, purification of SEOs and components were also recapitulated. Purification techniques of SEOs improve their utilization value due to the increased content of bioactive components. Finally, the review concentrated on the applications of SEOs in food industry, including food preservation, food active packaging by means of films or coatings, antioxidant properties. In addition, addressing the problem of unstability of SEOs and its role to inhibit the pathogenic bacteria, the encapsulation of SEOs for use in the food industrial sectors reduces the safety risk to human health.

Keywords:

• Essential oils of spices
• highly efficient extraction
• purification
• bioactivity
• application strategies

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the financial supports from the China Key Research Programs (Contract No. 2017YFD0400501), National First-Class Discipline Program of Food Science and Technology (No. JUFSTR20180205), Yangzhou City Agricultural Key R&D Program (No.YZ2019034), the 111 Project (BP0719028), Jiangsu Provincial Key Laboratory of Advanced Food Manufacturing Equipment and Technology Project (No.FMZ202003), all of which enabled us to carry out this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.