Opportunities and Challenges for Functional and Medicinal Beverages

Dear Colleagues,

Beverages are the most important foodstuff present in daily consumption due to their properties. This is because they are easy to transport, store, and can be served to consumers’ preferences; furthermore, producers who are focused on developing new, innovative, and green products have to answer to new demands regarding nutritional and sensorial properties. However, in recent decades, new trends in the field of beverages have been recorded, opening new horizons by reinventing beverages as functional and medicinal beverages. The fortification of beverages in this way raises challenges regarding the improvement of nutritional and sensorial properties, and the quality assessment and precise characterization of the new developed products. Moreover, this also raises issues related to production technologies, that must answer to the new demands of innovative and novel foods, food safety, the circular economy, and sustainability.

Functional and medicinal beverages also create new opportunities for the better use of natural resources rich in bioactive compounds, the prevention of the pathological issues, and the promotion of healthy lifestyles.

Most functional and medicinal beverages are based on plant components that are well known from folk medicine, but new approaches are utilizing animal and microbial origin components through biotechnological techniques.

Herbs, fruits, vegetables, and medicinal plants are a valuable source of bioactive and high nutritional value raw materials that in classical approaches lead to the transformation of beverages into real nutraceuticals, i.e., functional and medicinal beverages. However, there is actual research that identifies and proposes animal and microbial raw materials as sources of components for enhancing the health benefits of beverages. A new trend is also emerging that is focused on sources from other non-conventional plants (algae, plant origin parasites or lichens) that have been rarely used in the past. These approaches pay attention to their specific phytochemical properties, their benefits for health stimulation, and their biological and bioactive activities (e.g., anti-viral, nutrient absorption stimulation, anti-tumor, anti-diabetes, hepatic-protective effects, anti-aging, increase in lifespan, and body functionality).

There are opportunities and challenges in the research and development of functional and medicinal beverages because plants provide a wide variety of chemical constituents considered valuable for enhancing body functions and preventing pathological issues. This is due to the fact that the percentage of these ingredients is low in most of the cases, thus representing a challenge in the production of functional and medicinal beverages. Also, the high content of sugars and other nutritional compounds that leads to their quick adulteration requires specific treatments for preservation, but this leads to the degradation of bioactive compounds. Animal and microbiological sources of raw materials raise food safety issues and in this way the production and preservation of functional and medicinal beverages is also very demanding. The assessment of the physicochemical, biochemical, bioactive, and technological properties are also important challenges that should be optimized. On the other hand, the new technological solutions that have emerged in recent decades (e.g., HPP pasteurization, use of PEF, microencapsulation, etc.) are considerable opportunities that provide new directions in functional and medicinal beverages development. Sustainability is also an important opportunity as it enables the superior valorization of local resources through innovative methods and efficient techniques (e.g., green extraction, the circular economy, and short supply chain) enhances the benefits and market share of functional and medicinal beverages .

We invite you to contribute your research articles, communications or reviews to this Special Issue; these should address the extraction and isolation of the nutraceuticals of plants foods and also novel sources, and should also consider their phytochemical properties, health benefits or biological activities.

Dr. Adrian Vasile Timar
Dr. Giurgiulescu Liviu
Guest Editors

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• functional beverages
• medicinal beverages
• bioactive substances
• nutraceuticals
• health benefits
• biological activities
• instrumental analysis