Flavoring properties that affect the retention of volatile components during encapsulation process

Flavorings are widely used in food and beverage industries and spray drying is the most cost-effective encapsulation technique to deliver stable products. Generally, the same slurry is used to encapsulate both hydrophilic and hydrophobic flavors which led sometimes to lower retention. The same slurry formulation composed by Modified Starch and Maltodextrin 20DE was loaded with 35% of two different flavorings (orange and passion fruit) and, spray dried under the same conditions. The flavorings selected had different octanol/water partition coefficients and their composition affected the emulsion stability. Orange flavoring presented clearly better emulsion stability than passion fruit flavoring, confirmed by size distribution and Turbiscan Stability Index (TSI (orange) ≪ TSI (passion fruit)). A key learning from this work is that the best infeed emulsion achieved by the most hydrophobic flavoring, presented the lowest droplet size and yielded in final bigger particle size and the best encapsulation efficiency result (>92%).