# Unlocking Wellness: Probiotics as Key Drivers in Functional Food Innovation and Health Promotion
## 7 Final Considerations and Future Perspectives  
The functional food market has witnessed rapid growth in recent years, primarily driven by heightened consumer health and nutrition awareness. As a core functional ingredient, probiotics have emerged as a significant driver of innovation and health-conscious consumer trends in the global food industry by leveraging their unique health benefits, including gut microbiota modulation, immune enhancement, and metabolic disease intervention. The objective of this review was to promote the development of functional foods, investigate probiotic applications, and establish a theoretical foundation for developing the next generation of high-quality functional foods. Currently, probiotics are extensively utilized in dairy products, meat products, and dietary supplements, yet they encounter several technical and market challenges, including insufficient efficacy validation, product homogenization, and regulatory barriers. Moreover, probiotics encounter systemic challenges in translating scientific findings into commercial applications. Laboratory-scale encapsulation technologies face numerous challenges during industrialization, including strain survival rate reductions caused by shear forces and temperature fluctuations, material costs exceeding food industry thresholds, insufficient processing tolerance, shelf-life degradation, and other persistent issues. Future development necessitates the establishment of a multi-dimensional evidence system, including the construction of organ microarrays and organoid models, to overcome limitations in probiotic efficacy validation. Research and development efforts should prioritize strain innovation while fostering interdisciplinary collaboration across medicine, food science, and data science to develop probiotic strains with unique functional characteristics. The regulatory framework must be strengthened through coordinated communication and scientifically rationalized approaches. The involvement of governments and industry associations is critical for developing and harmonizing international regulations and standards, promoting global regulatory harmonization of probiotic products, and reducing trade barriers. Continuous technological innovation, the optimization of microencapsulation technologies, the integration of advanced methods such as gene editing, and the refinement of continuous flow production processes are essential to enhance strain stability. Additionally, developing low-cost alternative materials is crucial for producing commercially viable, scalable, probiotic-rich functional foods, bridging the gap between research and industry. In conclusion, probiotics hold significant potential in functional food development. Through continuous technological innovation and interdisciplinary collaboration, the current challenges can be addressed, the application scope of probiotics can be expanded, and safer, more effective, and palatable functional foods can be developed, thereby making substantial contributions to human health.  
Y.H.: investigation, methodology, and writing--original draft. Y.Z.: investigation and methodology. H.X.: funding acquisition, project administration, and writing--review and editing. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
This research was supported by Research Project of State Key Laboratory of Food Science and Resources, Nanchang University, China (Project No. SKLF-ZZB-202328).  
No data were used in the manuscript.  
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.