Advances in Technology for Production of Fruit Bar: A Review

Abstract

Fruits serve as a source of energy, vitamins, minerals, and dietary fiber. One of the barriers in increasing fruit and vegetables consumption is time required to prepare them and the high perishability. Processing these high value food into fruit bars or fruit leather can be a good, convenient and better alternative. Fruit bar is the product prepared by blending fruit purees or pulp extracted from ripe pulpy fruit, sugar or other nutritive sweeteners and other ingredients and additives desired for product and dehydrated to form sheet which can be cut to desired shape and size. Fruit bars can also be nutritionally improved through fortification such as concentrated protein sources to improve its food value. Further, fruit bars can also act as suitable matrix for incorporation of prebiotics as well as probiotics. Sugar is an important ingredient in traditional fruit bar preparation. There is possibilities of use of alternate sweeteners and other sugar substitutes for preparation of fruit bar to meet the increasing demands of low calorie snack food. There is also great potential for use of solar energy as well as alternate drying techniques for popularization of fruit bar processing in rural areas.