Migration of antimicrobial agents from starch-based films into a food simulant

Abstract The migration of antimicrobial (AM) agents carvacrol, thymol and linalool from heat pressed and coated starch-based packaging films into isooctane was investigated and the release of the agents consistently obeyed first-order kinetics. When the test temperature was increased from 15 to 35 °C, the diffusion coefficients increased from 6.3 × 10 −13 to 12.9 × 10 −13  m −2  s −1 for carvacrol, from 12.0 × 10 −13 to 29.7 × 10 −13  m −2  s −1 for thymol and from 9.5 × 10 −13 to 19.0 × 10 −13  m −2  s −1 for linalool from the heat pressed starch-based films. The diffusion coefficients of carvacrol, thymol and linalool from coated starch-based films containing increased from 2.2 × 10 −13 to 8.7 × 10 −13  m −2  s −1 , from 2.7 × 10 −13 to 6.1 × 10 −13  m −2  s −1 and from 5.1 × 10 −13 to 9.4 × 10 −13  m −2  s −1 respectively between 15 and 35 °C. The activation energies for the migration of carvacrol, thymol and linalool from the heat pressed films were 26.2, 33.6 and 25.5 kJ mol −1 respectively and those for the migration from the coated systems were 31.3, 3.0 and 22.5 kJ mol −1 respectively. The results suggest that the AM agents show a potential for use as AM packaging materials.