Towards new food emulsions: designing the interface and beyond

Summary

Emulsions are ubiquitous in foods, and decades of research work have led to advanced, although often empirical, control over the formulation and functionality of those systems. However, the conventional strategies to make food emulsions have to be revisited, due to the trends in the food sector area that have emerged in recent years. This includes a strong focus on naturalness, health and sustainability, which promotes the use of plant-derived ingredients, ideally obtained from mild processing, and thus, by essence, far from pure and well-characterized. Adapting to this change of mind while ensuring the physicochemical stability of emulsions is a challenge, and requires that researchers invest effort into deep characterization of the emulsions’ microstructure and dynamics, for which tools to characterize multiple scales are, more than ever, an essential need.