**6. Conclusions**

Bioactive compounds, such as polyphenols attract a lot of attention from scientists, functional food product developers and consumers due to their health-promoting effects. Most of these compounds are chemically unstable and encapsulation techniques have been widely applied in order to enhance their stability. Nevertheless, freeze-drying is still assumed to be the most suitable for heat-sensitive compounds. The adequate method of encapsulation depends on the type of polyphenol and material for encapsulation, however. Therefore, it cannot be generally said that freeze-drying is better than spray-drying or vice versa. Choosing a polyphenol carrier is important in order to achieve effective encapsulation. While freeze-drying will definitely result in a higher quality and better bioactivity retention compared with conventional spray drying methods, its application is excessively expensive, time consuming and limited in throughput capacity for most commercial applications. Therefore, in order to increase the number and variety of products on the consumer markets, as well as the application range of encapsulated polyphenols, new technologies will need to be researched and if necessary developed.

This paper contributes to the insights into previously researched and optimized encapsulating conditions for a large number of polyphenol-rich materials.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, M.K., A.P. and J.Š.; methodology, I.B. and A.P.; investigation, I.B. and A.P.; writing—I.B.; writing—review and editing, M.K., A.P. and J.Š.; project administration, M.K.; funding acquisition, M.K. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This work was part of the project PZS-2019-02-1595 which has been fully supported by the "Research Cooperability" Program of the Croatian Science Foundation, funded by the European Union from the European Social Fund under the Operational Program for Efficient Human Resources 2014–2020.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** Not applicable.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
