Antimicrobial film food packaging: incorporation of zein nanoparticles with clove essential oil: article / Abdul Hadi Mohd Faizal Din Chan

Food packaging is now used for maintaining the quality, healthy and nutritious of the food at the time of consumption and provided safety over long distances of travel or inhibit the contamination of microorganisms. Recently, the food packaging that is developed is not environmental friendly and exposed from external environment that causes the shelf life of the food is reduced. The objectives of this paper are to characterize and synthesize Zein nanoparticles with clove essential oil incorporated in film and also to determine the antimicrobial activity in the prepared film food packaging. In this study, antimicrobial agent from the Zein nanoparticles with different concentration of clove essential oil (2.5,5,7.5,10 and 12.5%) was incorporated during the synthetization of film food packaging. Zein powder are used as nanoparticles and the nanocomposite films was prepared by solvent casting method. There are three analysis that was conducted in this research which are thermal behaviour that was done by using Thermogravimetric Analyzer (TGA), toxicity by using Inductively Coupled Plasma Optical Emission Spectrometry (ICP-OES) and antimicrobial activity. As for the thermal behaviour of the film, the incorporation of higher concentration of clove essential oil with Zein nanoparticles prove that it is more thermally stable than other films. As for toxicity, it was surprisingly that the result of Arsenic content exceeded the maximum amount of standard in food packaging but for the Cadmium and Plumbum are in the safety margin. Lastly, the antimicrobial activity of the film showed that all of the composite film inhibits the growth of the tested bacteria, E. coli. The inhibition of bacteria increased remarkably as the concentration of clove essential oil increased. For the control film, Zein nanoparticles consist the antimicrobial agents that can inhibit the growth of the bacteria even in small amount. Therefore, the incorporation of Zein nanoparticles with clove essential oil in the development of antimicrobial food packaging in order to extend the shelf life of food products must be developed.