Development and characterisation of active antioxidant packaging films

The development of food packaging materials from naturally renewable resources and the incorporation of natural preservatives might be one way to address the problem on food packaging wastes and aid in the increasing awareness of consumers on healthy lifestyle. The present work was conducted to develop edible films based on gelatine and carboxymethylcellulose (CMC) incorporated with Antidesma bunius (L.) Spreng. (bignay) phenolic extract for possible application as active edible film. The optimisation of the antioxidant activity and tensile strength of the films was done using mixture design of experiments using Design Expert (version 10.0.3.1). Results showed that the responses were mainly affected by the amount of bignay extract whose total phenolic content was found to be 444.36 +/- 25.78 mg gallic acid equivalents/100 g puree, and antioxidant activity of 65.25 +/- 0.71% DPPH radical scavenging capacity and 50.74 +/- 0.60% ABTS radical scavenging capacity. The optimised proportion of gelatine, CMC and bignay was found to be 15% gelatine, 56% CMC and 29% bignay extract with 25.89% +/- 1.26% DPPH radical scavenging capacity and a tensile strength of 7.45 +/- 1.00 MPa. The colour analysis on the optimised film with an average final thickness of 0.10 +/- 0.02 mm revealed an L* value of 79.29 +/- 2.38 and positive values for a* (3.09 +/- 0.23) and b* (3.13 +/- 1.30). (C) All Rights Reserved