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Thursday, April 17, 2008

Water-proof edible packaging

Edible films have been increasingly used in recent years to protect food items from oxygen and also as a more sustainable alternative to traditional packaging.

But the most commonly used material for an edible film, a polysaccharide such as starch, has one significant disadvantage: it is broken down by water. That means that so far edible packaging is much less useful than more traditional and less sustainable materials like plastics.

Now Jung Han at the department of food science at the University of Manitoba in Canada says that adding beeswax to starch from peas produces an edible material that can be spread into thin films but is water resistant too. Perhaps plastic packaging's days are numbered ? although Han doesn't describe how a pea starch and beeswax mix tastes.

Read the full waterproof edible packaging patent application.

Justin Mullins, New Scientist consultant