Harnessing molecular architecture to design novel and nutritional food products

Food products combine a variety of molecular architectures and physical phases leading to the formation of unique structures responsible for specific mouthfeel sensation and texture. The food texture is mainly controlled by the molecular assemblies on a different length scales from the molecular interactions and structural assembly to the bulk network arrangement. These structures can be harnessed to improve food nutritional value by replacing harmful ingredients, such as saturated fat, while maintaining preferable consumer experience.

The talk will present new ways to exploit various structuring methods to form food systems with unique nutritional and textural attributes. More specifically, the development, characterization, and utilization of combination of oil and water structuring approaches using proteins, polysaccharides, and low molecular weight oil gelators to formulate biphasic gel system, termed bigel, will be presented. The final gel system performance will be discussed with respect to various characteristics spanning from the molecular level of the crystal structure to the phases distribution, all the way to the bulk gel behavior. The results revealed that the structuring agent concentration and preparation procedure have a significant impact on the gel mechanical properties and stability. The effect of preparation conditions was related to the oil gelator crystallization temperature where the formed crystals contribute to the biphasic gel stability and consistency.  These effects were also related to the droplet size and distribution which were visually seen using confocal microscopy. The role of the biphasic interface behavior was also discussed where the dispersed phase interactions with the continuous phase contributed to the overall gel stability according to the “active filler” theory known from other scientific fields. Overall, plant-based bigel systems can enrich the nutritional profile of food materials aiming to improve the consumer health and wellbeing, while maintaining consumption experience.