Natural products from Camellia oleifera fruit and its comprehensive utilisation

Abstract

Camellia oleifera (C. oleifera) is a woody oil plant with a good reputation of ‘Oriental Olive Oil’ in China. The national understanding of the health-care benefits of Camellia oil are already widespread, but the production of C. oleifera fruit has not been achieved large-scale industrialisation. In this review, we focus on the properties and commercial value of its natural products, and processing technology, performance characterisation, and novel modification strategies of its processed products. In addition, we briefly summarised the research progress of breeding and put forward the comprehensive utilisation of C. oleifera fruit based on the tandem of extraction and processing. This review might attract more researchers to make profound study regarding it as an alternative of olive oil.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

Keywords:

• Camellia oleifera
• natural products
• processed products
• comprehensive utilisation

Disclosure statement

No conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2018YFD1000603-1), the Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province, China (2023JJ31000), and the Special Project of the Central Government Guiding Local Science and Technology Development (2022ZYC118).