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Highlights

Cinnamon essential oil was microencapsulated using various methods.

Abstract. Cinnamon essential oil has enormous potential for use in foods, pharmaceuticals, and cosmetics; however, its applications are currently limited due to its volatility and rapid degradation. In this study, cinnamon essential oil was microencapsulated using four methods. The main aims were to determine a suitable method for producing cinnamon essential oil microcapsule powder and to examine the physical properties of the microcapsule powder. The results indicated that the powder recovery values for spray-drying were much lower than for the other methods. For the same encapsulation method, samples with higher oil concentration had lower powder recovery and were harder to dissolve. Freeze-drying provided the highest encapsulation efficiency (92.3% to 95.2%), followed by drum-drying, spray-drying, and a manual method. Freeze-drying with an oil concentration of 27% was the most suitable method for microencapsulation in this study due to its higher solubility and encapsulation efficiency and having the lowest surface oil content for the product. Confocal laser scanning microscopy demonstrated that the cinnamon essential oil was well encapsulated in the freeze-dried microcapsules. The cinnamon essential oil microcapsules significantly impeded bacterial growth in minced chicken meat samples during chilled storage for 12 days.