**6. Food technology and its impact on functional food development**

Several strategies and technologies have been adopted for fortifying foodstuffs and increasing their nutritional value. Recently, vacuum impregnation as an emerging technology has captivated a lot of attention in food science and technology. This technique is an operation whereby a liquid medium containing bioactive compounds enters the solid porous food in favor of internal gas through capillary pressure [35]. In

#### *Bioactive Ingredients in Functional Foods: Current Status and Future Trends DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.104416*

this regard, numerous studies conducted to enhance the nutritional quality of foods via this method, such as enriching ready-to-eat sweet potatoes with polyphenols [36], enriching potato tuber with ascorbic acid [37], fortifying potato snacks with calcium, vitamin C, and E [38], and incorporating *Lactobacillus casei* into apple cylinders [39].

High-pressure processing is a widely applied technology by which 10–1000 MP is exerted on foods at mild temperatures. This technique influences non-covalent bonds, including hydrogen, ionic, hydrophobic bonds. As this approach excludes heat treatment, it is tailored for the sterilization of foods containing thermo-sensitive BI [40]. Aguayo et al. [41] evaluated bioactive stability under two processes, including the high-pressure homogenization (HPH) treatments (80 and 120 MPa) versus thermal treatment (80 <sup>∘</sup> C, atmospheric pressure). They reported that the high-pressure process was a better alternative for the retention of heat-sensitive compounds such as vitamin C, vitamin A, and unsaturated fatty acids (10-hydroxy-2-decenoic acid). Not only might high-pressure processing averting loss of BI, in some cases, it could improve the nutritional value. In this regard, Saricaoglu et al. [42] claimed that high pressure homogenized rosehip nectars showed more antioxidant capacity after treatment owing to an increase in total carotenoid content.

Bioactive ingredients are usually susceptible to detrimental conditions such as low pH, and gastrointestinal conditions. Hence, encapsulation is a practical approach whereby bioactive compounds are protected from various deteriorative conditions by entrapping them in various non-toxic materials [43]. The most common materials exploited for encapsulation in food science are proteins [44], polysaccharides [45, 46], lipids [47], hydrogels [48], and metal-organic frameworks [49, 50] or a proper mixture of them for controlled release. A wide array of novel technologies has been utilized for the encapsulation of bioactive, some of the recent and intriguing ones are spray chilling [51], electrospinning [52], supercritical fluid [53], and microfluidic [54, 55]. The size of carriers is divided mainly into nano- or microcarriers [56]. The former has been used for most of the bioactive compounds [47], and the latter is suited for both bioactive and probiotics [52].
