Engineering strategies for food fortification

Abstract

This opinion paper discusses how process engineering can be used for food fortification. The time of food processing can be utilized to incorporate nutrients into food with low nutritional benefits. Latest works have been proposing approaches to incorporate nutrients during osmotic dehydration, hydration, and cooking. Further, other works recommended using pretreatment time to add important components into food, such as minerals, vitamins, and bioactive compounds. Emerging technologies such as ultrasound and high hydrostatic pressure were recommended to accelerate the process. All recently published works have demonstrated the increment of nutrient content in the final products, but few of them analyzed their bioavailability, stability, or nutrient location in food. Therefore, there are still requirements for further studies, which are stated in the present work.