Probiotic technology – maintaining and enhancing probiotic viability

Probiotic functional foods face high technological demands because probiotics have to retain their viability during all the production steps and even in the GI tract of the consumer. Surveys of probiotic products on the market have revealed unfortunately common quantitative and qualitative deficiencies especially regarding labelling and viability of probiotic strain(s). These observations indicate that production and formulation processes aiming at maintaining and/or improving the viability and stability of probiotics are often non-optimal. For the successful production of high-quality probiotic products a solid knowledge on the characteristics of the production strain is necessary. Probiotics have usually been isolated from the human GI-tract and they are well adapted to that special environment. Various growth and down-stream processing steps of probiotic production thus unavoidably cause stress to microbes. There are several steps of probiotic production where probiotic viability and stability can be enhanced. These steps include strain selection and improvement of strain properties, production conditions, formulation, and packaging and storage. However, the technological robustness of a probiotic strain can also be improved. This can be done by activating the stress genes of the strain during processing with suitable sublethal treatments, or by genetically modifying the strain to make it more robust.