SSEF Silver Award

Materials used for layer-by-layer assembled microcapsules are often costly as they make use of pure chemicals. One example is the use of bovine serum albumin (BSA) and tannic acid (TA) for making edible microcapsules capable of delivering bioactive food-derived ingredients. However, the high costs of BSA and TA makes it unfeasible for mass production. Hence, egg and black tea are suggested as possible cheaper alternatives to BSA and TA respectively. Egg-tea multilayers were measured to have an overall thickness of 11nm for 3 bilayers, using precision ellipsometry. These egg-tea multilayers were then applied to making edible microcapsules. Results indicated that they are suitable for making microcapsules after analysis using simple microscopy. Overall, the process of making edible microcapsules could be made cheaper using natural precursors, and was found to be robust.