3. Results and discussion
3.1. Optimization of film formulations
The experimental designs and results used to study the influence of glycerol (A), palmitic acid (B), glycerol monostearate (C) and β-cyclodextrin (D) in the coating formulations on strawberry quality are shown in Table 1. Because of the high water activity of the fruit surface, WVR was chosen as the response parameter to define the efficiency of the coating formulations.
The result of the statistical analysis for the fitting of the experimental data to a second-order response function is shown in Table 2. The film performance was different depending on the concentration of added plasticizer and other reagents. Addition of palmitic acid improved the WVR. A formulation containing 2% glycerol + 0.5% palmitic acid + 0.5% glycerol monostearate + 0.5% β-cyclodextrin was chosen for the next experiment.