Starch is an attractive raw material as ingredient for edible film manufacture because of its low cost, abundant availability, renewability, and biodegradability. Nevertheless, starch based films exhibit several disadvantages such as brittleness and poor mechanical and barrier properties, which restrict its application for food packaging. The use of the extrusion technology as a pretreatment of the casting technique to change the starch structure in order to obtain edible films, may constitute an alternative to generate coatings with good functional properties and maintain longer the postharvest quality and shelf life of fruits. For this reason, the objective of this study was to optimize the conditions of an extrusion process to obtain a formulation of modified starch to elaborate edible films with good functional properties using the casting technique and assess the effect during the storage when applied on a model fruit. The best conditions of the extrusion process and concentration of plasticizers were obtained using response surface methodology. From optimization study, it was found that appropriate conditions to obtain starch edible films with the best mechanical and barrier properties were an extrusion temperature of 100 °C and a screw speed of 120 rpm, while the glycerol content was 16.73%. Also, once applied in fruit, the loss of quality attributes was diminished.
Keywords: Casting technique; Extrusion temperature; Glycerol content and postharvest quality; Optimization.