Safeguarding product structure and mechanical properties while using new sustainable sources and processing steps: a multiscale and interdisciplinary approach

With a growing global population, food consumption will exceed from that of today. We need to adapt to more sustainable sources and production methods, like using milder processing routes or replacing animal proteins by plant proteins. This implies the use of more complex mixtures as ingredient. We will investigate to what extent these more sustainable ingredient sources and processes can be used to manufacture products with desirable structural and mechanical properties. The strategy is twofold. One is to start with mildly purified plant extracts, investigate bulk and interfacial properties for specific product types and explore the effects of further purification of the ingredients. The other is to start with mixtures of well purified ingredients form the same plant source, investigate the same bulk and interfacial properties and explore the effects of mixing of the ingredients towards more complex composition. For both strategies, plant based protein mixtures are also mixed with dairy proteins to get insights in the effect of replacement of animal by plant protein on food product structural and mechanical properties.

In particular we aim a) to understand the conditions to produce products with desirable structural and mechanical properties from more sustainable ingredient sources, b) to quantify sustainability effects of source and processing methods for a set of sources and processes and c) to formulate main lever rules that relate the properties of sustainable produced complex ingredient mixtures for a given source to desired product properties like structure and mechanical properties on all relevant length scales.