Dear Colleagues,

In food and feed production, the use of plant extracts is a strategy of growing interest to replace the use of chemical and synthetic additives or ingredients as well as to meet consumer demand for innovative, high-quality, healthy, clean-labeled, and sustainable products. Other industries, such as cosmetics, phytotherapy, phytoiatric, etc., are also increasingly employing botanical extracts in response to the increased awareness regarding sustainability and well-being among the public and consumers.

At the same time, there is an urgent need to identify green encapsulation systems that can improve the solubility of lipophilic plant active ingredients, as well as the temporal stability of botanical extracts, without altering their chemical composition, to be able to successfully use them industrially.

In this context, industries are actively seeking new plant sources and environmentally friendly extraction methods for the recovery and encapsulation of these active compounds, aiming for the sustainable use of natural resources and environmental protection. As a result, innovative and unconventional extractive and encapsulation techniques are being developed in recent years to overcome the standard nonecological methodologies based on chemicals and solvents, which are no longer applicable.

Recently, unconventional and innovative extraction techniques using ultrasounds, microwaves, high pressures, supercritical fluids, natural deep eutectic solvents, pulsed electric fields, etc., have been developed to recover bioactive compounds from plants and their byproducts to achieve acceptable results in terms of both the yield and environmental sustainability of the applied process. In addition, the possibility of adopting a solvent-free green chemistry approach to encapsulate bioactives in micro- and/or nano-forms is increasingly attracting the attention of researchers worldwide.

In light of these considerations, this Special Issue will cover the most up-to-date knowledge on the green extraction/encapsulation of plant food products and byproducts in terms of innovative processes, methods, alternative solvents, and product safety, contributing to increasing the overall knowledge of plant-based phytochemicals, their biological activities, and innovative as well as sustainable processes.

Dr. Katya Carbone
Guest Editor

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• green chemistry
• encapsulation techniques
• green extraction techniques
• natural molecules
• functional properties
• plant food systems