Enrichment of bread with encapsulated probiotics as a functional product containing bioactive compounds: Principles, outcomes, and challenges

Bread is a well-known and popular product among people around the world. The processing stages involved, from flour milling to baking, can result in the degradation or loss of certain nutritional and bioactive compounds. Enrichment of bread with probiotics, despite their health-promoting properties and the production of a new product with high competitiveness at the commercial level, has challenges in terms of technology and production. For this study, articles were selected by order of preference in Web of Science, Scopus, Scimago, PubMed, Science Direct, Functional Food Science Publisher, Google Scholar and Google from 2000 to 2025 using a combination of the following keywords: “Enrichment”, “Fortification”, “Probiotics”, “Prebiotics”, “Synbiotics”, “Encapsulation”, “Bakery products”, “Bread”, “Cereals”, “Baking”, “Survival”, “Viability”, and “Bioactive compounds”. Accordingly, the challenges for incorporating probiotics into synbiotic breads, types of probiotics and functional synbiotics in bakery products, new and common methods for encapsulation of probiotics for enrichment of different synbiotic breads, application of encapsulated probiotics in enrichment based on the types of breads, and thermal stability of probiotics during baking are discussed. Breads containing encapsulated probiotics produced on a commercial level and the therapeutic properties of these breads are also investigated.