Currently, the food industry is investing in the development of more sustainable packaging alternatives that preserve nutritional quality as well as organoleptic characteristics such as colour, taste, smell and texture.
For this reason, a film was developed by a research group in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, composed of scientists from the Department of Materials Engineering and Bioprocesses at the School of Chemical Engineering of the State University of Campinas (FEQ-UNICAMP) and the Packaging Technology Center of the University of Campinas Food Technology Institute (ITAL) of the Ministry of Agriculture and Utilities of the State of São Paulo, also in Campinas.
The film is made from a compound made from limonene, the main component of citrus peel, and chitosan, a biopolymer derived from chitin found in crustacean exoskeletons. “We focused on lime because Brazil is one of the world’s largest orange producers [if not the largest] and São Paulo is the leading orange producing state,” said Roniérik Pioli Vieira, Professor at FEQ-UNICAMP.
Limonene has previously been used in food packaging films to improve preservation due to its antioxidant and antimicrobial properties. However, its performance is hampered by volatility and instability during the packaging manufacturing process, even on a laboratory scale.
“To solve this problem, we came up with the idea of using a derivative of limonene called poly(limonene), which is neither volatile nor particularly unstable,” Vieira said.