Trends on the rapid expansion of supercritical solutions process applied to food and non-food industries.

BACKGROUND: The growing interest on supercritical fluids applied to particle engineering over the last years has received attention from the food and non-food industries, in terms of processing, packaging and preservation of these products. The rapid expansion of supercritical solutions (RESS) process is an efficient and promising method to produce small particles with narrow size distribution.

OBJECTIVE: In this review we report technological aspects on the application of RESS process applied to the food and non-food industry, considering recent data and patent survey registered in literature.

METHODS: The effect of process parameters solvent, temperature, pressure, nozzle size among others, during RESS on the size, structure and morphology of the resulted particles, and the main differences about recent patented RESS processes are reviewed.

RESULTS: Most of experimental works intend to optimize their processes through investigation of process parameters.

CONCLUSIONS: RESS is an efficient and ecological alternative for the production of particles with high yield of bioactive constituents of interest to food industry. On the other hand, patents developed using this type of process to food products are very scarce, less attention being given be given to the potential of this technique to develop particles from plant extracts with bioactive substances.