Application of chicken feet gelatin incorporated with oil palm leaves extract as food coating / Nur Hidayah Mahazir

Food coating helps to maintain the nutritional value and organoleptic quality of food by shielding it from outside microbial and environmental impacts. Native gelatin as coating can be used to package food, but their use is limited by the fact that they are moisture-sensitive and easily dissolve, swell, or break when in contact with water. Chicken feet, often considered waste during poultry processing, offer a sustainable source of collagen for gelatin extraction. Oil palm leaves, abundantly available in Malaysia, are rich in bioactive compounds with promising functional properties. Thus this study explores the potential of chicken feet gelatin (CFG) as a biopolymer matrix enhanced with oil palm leaves extract (OPLE) for applications as food coating. The CFG was incorporated with OPLE at different concentrations. From FTIR analysis, it clearly shows that CFG was succesfully crosslinked with OPLE by the presence of peak at 1645cm-1 for all the modified coatings. The antioxidant activity test shows that all the modified coatings had higher activity compared to unmodified coatings. However antimicrobial activity of the modified coating shows no inhibition zone probably due to the shorter drying period of the agar plates. For preservation studies of chicken sausage and grapes, the weight loss of sausage and grapes was decreasing when comparing uncoated and coated with different concentration of OPLE-CFG and the browning index of grapes was also decreasing at 40C. Unfortunately, browning index of grapes at room temperature are decreasing from uncoated to coated with 10 mL OPLE-CFG then roses up when coated with 15 mL OPLE-CFG due to some experimental error. Overall OPLE-CFG has promising potential to replace synthetic coating as food coating after combining OPLE to CFG to improved it barrier properties, antimicrobial activity, antioxidant properties and fruit and meat quality preservation.