TY - JOUR A1 - Hauser, Carolin A1 - Senturk Parreidt, Tugce A1 - Kowalska, U. A1 - Suminska, P. T1 - Shelf-life extension of fresh produce by edible coating JF - italian journal of food science N2 - Fresh and fresh-cut produce get a growing share on the worldwide food market as they combine the aspect of convenience food with healthy nutrition. Nevertheless, these nontreated food products bear a risk of microbial contamination with pathogenic microorganisms and have limited shelf-life due to their fresh character and big surface. Edible coatings can comply with several functions to protect those sensitive food products. In this study alginate was used as coating for fresh-cut cantaloupe melon to act as a barrier to water loss and a carrier for antimicrobial hop extracts. For mung bean sprouts chitosan, which is antimicrobial by nature, was used. Both experiments showed that edible coatings can enhance the shelf-life of these products. The edible coatings have to be designed for each produce individually. KW - alginate KW - cantaloupe melon KW - edible coating KW - fresh cut KW - hop extract Y1 - 2016 VL - 2016 IS - 28 PB - Codon Publications ET - 5 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Senturk Parreidt, Tugce A1 - Schmid, Markus A1 - Hauser, Carolin T1 - Validation of a Novel Technique and Evaluation of the Surface Free Energy of Food JF - Foods N2 - Characterizing the physical properties of a surface is largely dependent on determining the contact angle exhibited by a liquid. Contact angles on the surfaces of rough and irregularly-shaped food samples are difficult to measure using a contact angle meter (goniometer). As a consequence, values for the surface energy and its components can be mismeasured. The aim of this work was to use a novel contact angle measurement method, namely the snake-based ImageJ program, to accurately measure the contact angles of rough and irregular shapes, such as food samples, and so enable more accurate calculation of the surface energy of food materials. In order to validate the novel technique, the contact angles of three different test liquids on four different smooth polymer films were measured using both the ImageJ software with the DropSnake plugin and the widely used contact angle meter. The distributions of the values obtained by the two methods were different. Therefore, the contact angles, surface energies, and polar and dispersive components of plastic films obtained using the ImageJ program and the Drop Shape Analyzer (DSA) were interpreted with the help of simple linear regression analysis. As case studies, the superficial characteristics of strawberry and endive salad epicarp were measured with the ImageJ program and the results were interpreted with the Drop Shape Analyzer equivalent according to our regression models. The data indicated that the ImageJ program can be successfully used for contact angle determination of rough and strongly hydrophobic surfaces, such as strawberry epicarp. However, for the special geometry of droplets on slightly hydrophobic surfaces, such as salad leaves, the program code interpolation part can be altered. KW - contact angle KW - surface energy KW - edible coating KW - image processing KW - drop shape analysis Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3390/foods6040031 SN - 2304-8158 VL - 6 IS - 4 PB - MDPI AG CY - Basel ER -