Before long, you’ll be able to find a box of fresh-picked, delicious strawberries at your local grocery store or garage. But it’s disappointing when you bring them home and find that the bottoms have started to rot. To improve the life of the fruit, researchers report (Edible CBD oil can extend the shelf life of strawberries) that ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces introduced cannabidiol – a non-hallucinogenic substance in cannabis known as CBD – and sodium alginate into an edible antimicrobial coating.
CBD is popular because of its potential therapeutic effects. But this cannabinoid has been shown to have antioxidant and antimicrobial properties.
In previous studies, CBD inhibited the growth of certain bacteria and fungi, such as those that eat fresh fruit and vegetables.
However, the oil mixture must be dispersed evenly in water before it is widely applied to food or used to preserve food. One possible way to achieve this is to coat CBD molecules with edible polymers.
So Pongpat Sukhavattanakul, Sarute Ummartyotin and their colleagues wanted to see if coating food from nanoparticles of CBD could enhance the antimicrobial activity and improve the freshness of strawberries.
The researchers coated CBD with poly(D,L-lactide-co-glycolide), a biodegradable polymer used in drug delivery, creating a material 400 nm in diameter.
They mixed stable nanoparticles, containing 20% by weight of CBD, with sodium alginate and water.
The strawberries are then immersed in a solution containing different types of nanoparticles before being dipped into a mixture of ascorbic acid and calcium chloride to turn the colorless coating into a gel.
Treated and untreated strawberries were then placed in open plastic bags at refrigerator temperature.
After 15 days, CBD-treated samples matured and degraded more slowly than untreated samples, possibly due to reduced microbial growth.
The coating with large nanoparticles of CBD preserves the red color of the fruit, greatly improves their antioxidant activity, and shows the best protection during storage, suggesting that this type will lead to life the longest defense.
The researchers said their results show how CBD can be used to coat colorless coatings for functional food packaging.
Source: American Chemical Society.
