ABSTRACT
The food industry faces serious challenges in the twenty-first century. Consumers are demanding more from the foods they eat. Encapsulation is a topic of interest in a wide range of scientific and industrial areas, varying from pharmaceutics to agriculture and from pesticides to enzymes. The demand for encapsulation technologies is growing at around 10% annually, driven by both increasing fortification with healthy ingredients and the consumer demand for novel products. Encapsulation involves the coating or entrapment of a desired component within a secondary material to prevent or delay the release of the active or core ingredient until a certain time or a set of conditions is achieved. Encapsulation can potentially offer numerous benefits to the materials being encapsulated. The release of the core material from a delivery device may be programmed to be immediate, delayed, pulsatile, or prolonged over an extended period of time.
