Postbiotics for improving food quality and safety: From mechanistic insights to industrial applications

Growing consumer demand for nutritious, safe, and sustainable foods is accelerating the shift toward green preservation technologies and bio-based additives. Among natural microbial derivatives, postbiotics—the non-viable microbial cells, metabolites, and cell components released after cell lysis—are emerging as stable and safe bioprotective agents. Unlike live probiotics or prebiotics, postbiotics are environmentally resilient, free from infectivity risks, and retain their functional bioactivity under industrial processing conditions. Their antimicrobial, antioxidant, and immunomodulatory properties support their broad application in food-safety enhancement and biopreservation. This review brings together current insights into the composition, bioactivity, and functionality of postbiotics across diverse food systems, emphasizing recent advances in their characterization and quantification and our understanding of the mechanisms by which they act. It also critically evaluates major challenges related to strain specificity, substrate influences, analytical standardization, regulatory alignment, and mechanistic insights regarding postbiotics functionality, underscoring key scientific research gaps that must be addressed to enable their full-scale industrial adoption. Despite these limitations, postbiotics offer a promising, sustainable alternative for food safety and preservation and warrant further in-depth research and development to enable their successful commercialization. • Postbiotics are an effective alternative for natural and safe preservation. • Postbiotics incorporated into food products maintain high functionality. • Fermentation products of beneficial microbes potentiate sustainable agriculture. • Postbiotics comprise functional metabolites produced by beneficial microbes.