Biotechnological approaches for the preparation of FOS based prebiotic and probiotic foods

The global food landscape is rapidly evolving, as consumer needs, shift with
changing lifestyles. With these changes, the market for processed or ready to eat products
has grown. Enhancement of these products with functional food ingredients such as
prebiotics and probiotics could meet the consumers’ demand for foods with benefits
beyond basic nutrition. In line with this trend, the focus of the research has been on the
use of beverages, traditional sweets and most ideally the fruits and vegetables as a source
for delivery of prebiotics and probiotics.
Fruits and vegetables were enriched with fructooligosaccharides (FOS), a low
calorie prebiotic using vacuum osmotic dehydration (VOD) process. The final product
contained 8.02-17.21 g/100 g FOS without affecting the sensory attributes. Processing
conditions were optimized using statically designed experiments and under the optimized
conditions, the uptake of FOS in banana was found to be 9.64 g/100g of fruit pieces. Fruit
juice could be considered as a novel, appropriate medium for fortification with
prebiotics/probiotics. Fruit juice beverages (pineapple, mango, and orange) were fortified
with FOS and the physicochemical characteristics of the fortified juices during storage
have been carried out. The FOS content of pineapple, mango and orange juices was 3.79,
3.45, and 3.62 g/100ml respectively.
Catering to the needs of the present day consumers’ desire to have low calorific
products, gulab jamun, a traditional Indian sweet with FOS was prepared. In addition
synbiotic shrikhand, milk based sweet with FOS and probiotic Enterococcus faecium
CFR 3002 was also prepared. Studies also lead to the successful enrichment of star fruits
with FOS and Enterococcus hirae CFR3001 and with a reference culture Lactobaccilus
salivarius CFR 2158, to have synbiotic functional star fruits. The synbiotic star fruits
contained 17.80-20.24 g/100g FOS and 138-178x106cfu/g probiotics. The probiotics (E.
hirae CFR3001 and E. faecium CFR 3002) used in the study were isolated from fruits and
vegetables and were identified at species level based on the phenotypic characteristics
and 16S rRNA gene sequences.
Sensorially acceptable, physicochemically characterized fruit juice beverages,
gulab jamun, shrikhand and fruits and vegetables enriched with FOS and/or probiotics
have been the outcome of the study paving way for commercialization.