Eco-friendly packaging for functional foods aims to reduce environmental impact while maintaining product integrity and ensuring consumer safety. Both the food industry and consumers must transition toward packaging solutions that are sustainable, biodegradable, and non-toxic. Among the key benefits of using environmentally friendly materials for functional food packaging are their sustainability, growing consumer preference, and regulatory compliance. Functional foods are products that offer health benefits beyond basic nutrition, such as enhancing immunity, improving digestion, or promoting overall well-being. This review emphasizes that the packaging of functional foods using an eco-friendly design approach is aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals and the consumers’ preferences. It included the definition and regulatory framework of functional foods, the bioactivity and health effects of bioactive compounds/microorganisms, packaging requirements and solutions for functional foods, as well as conventional and innovative analytical techniques for bioactive compound analysis. Eco-friendly packaging for functional foods is environmentally vital for waste reduction, socially crucial for meeting conscious demand, and economically sound for driving sustainable innovation and green markets.

Food powders were produced from olive pomace (Coratina, COP, and Arbequina, AOP) using freeze-drying with maltodextrin (MD) and native corn starch (NS) as wall materials in varying proportions. Optical microscopy revealed that OP was partially recovered by MD and NS. COP presented a total polyphenol content (TPC) of 53.8 g GAE/kg; meanwhile, AOP was 31.9 g GAE/kg. Accordingly, powders obtained from COP presented higher TPC than those from AOP. NS allowed obtaining powders with higher TPC and antioxidant activity. The greatest encapsulation efficiency was achieved by using 15% MD, achieving values of 94.9% for COP and 89.4% for AOP. Hydroxytyrosol was identified as the predominant polyphenol in the powders. It was demonstrated that powders could be added to food formulations and withstand cooking temperatures up to 220 °C without suffering a significant thermal degradation. Chemometric analysis of MIR and NIR spectra evidenced that they are analytical techniques capable of differentiating OP varieties and wall material types, besides variations in OP concentration. Results derived from this study demonstrated that it is feasible to give added value to olive pomace, obtaining powders rich in antioxidants to be used as ingredients of functional foods.

Coating is the process of covering solid particles surface with a homogeneous layer of a coating agent comprising one or multiple components. For processes carried out in fluidized beds, coating is achieved by spraying the coating agent on the particles in suspension. The aim of the present work was to study the atomization of molten materials prior to its application to powder coating in fluidized beds. Several external mixing binary nozzles were used for the atomization of a stearic-palmitic acid mixture and different polyethylene glycol grades (1000, 1500, 2050, 4000 and 6000) at 60, 70, 80 and 90 C. The droplet size distributions, from which experimental mean droplet sizes were calculated, were measured by the laser diffraction technique. Subsequently, mean droplet sizes were satisfactorily modeled using different correlations reported in the literature. For a given nozzle, it was found that some fitting parameters were constant for all the polyethylene glycol grades, while some others showed a dependency with the material viscosity, being this property the one with the highest variability over the experimental domain. The fitted models did not provide a good prediction of the experimental data corresponding to different nozzle configurations or molten materials; therefore, new fittings were performed. This fact highlights the difficulty in obtaining models at least applicable to molten materials atomization.