Table 3.

Beneficial Effects of Nanoencapsulation in Agri-Food Applications

Nature-Derived Polymer Used	Delivery System or Technology	Active Ingredient	Beneficial Effect
Cellulose	Edible films with nanofibers	Ginger oil and citric acid	Improved shelf-life of ready-to-cook chicken by 6 days (Khaledian et al., 2019)
Alginate	Edible films containing nanoemulsions	LEO	Inhibited the growth of Escherichia coli to 2 log units and minimized ethylene production to nearly zero for 2 weeks on cut apples (Salvia-Trujillo et al., 2015)
Quinoa protein and chitosan	Nanoemulsion-loaded edible coatings	Thymol	Decreased yeast and fungal growths to 2 log units and reduced weight loss by 20% on refrigerated strawberries (Robledo et al., 2017)
Chitosan	Nanoparticles	CEO	Prevented fungal decay of cucumbers for 21 days (Mohammadi et al., 2015)
Zein-chitosan	Nanoparticles	EGCG	Prevented oxidation of fatty foods (Liang et al., 2017)
Chitosan	Nanoparticles	CEO	Increased shelf-life of beef patties by 6 days (Ghaderi-Ghahfarokhi et al., 2017)
Chitosan	Nanoparticles	Nutrients—N, P, and K	Shortened the life cycle of wheat plants from 170 to 130 days (Abdel-Aziz et al., 2016)
Hydroxyapatite	Nanofertilizer	Urea	Increase in yield with only 50% of the conventional fertilizer used (Kottegoda et al., 2017)
Chitosan-alginate	Nanoparticles	Imazapic and Imazapyr	Decreased the toxicity of pesticides by 50% (Maruyama et al., 2016)
Chitosan	Nanoparticles	Paraquat	Reduced the toxicity of the herbicide by 4-fold (Grillo et al., 2014)
Chitosan-alginate	Nanocapsules	Acetamiprid	Provided a controlled release of the insecticide for 36 h (Kumar et al., 2015)