ABSTRACT
This chapter summarises nutrients in foods, their functional properties, and their level of stability and discusses retention of nutrients during spray drying of fruit, vegetable, and plant juices. It reviews microencapsulation of these nutrients and describes the effect of novel approaches in spray drying of nutrients. Vitamins, some minerals, phenolics, pigments, phytosterols, dietary fibers, and omega-3 fatty acids can be classified as nutrients. One of the main factors that affects the stability of ascorbic acid during spray drying is carrier materials and their concentrations. There are many different microencapsulation techniques which can be employed to microencapsulate nutrients. Spray drying, freeze drying, fluid bed drying, coacervation, internal gelation, extrusion, and emulsification are some of the used microencapsulation techniques. Spray drying of foods is generally applied to increase shelf life of products. The low moisture content of the obtained product provides long shelf life. The improvement of the quality of spray-dried products and microcapsules is of major interest to food scientists.
