Designing a sustainable oleosome aqueous extraction: A new way to make emulsion-based foods

Many food products are emulsion-based. These are generally produced from refined oils that have been extracted using hexane and have been refined to yield a very pure oil. The oils are then emulsified using emulsifiers and stabilizers. In this work we proposed a different route, where the oil-storing structures in oil-bearing seeds, oleosomes, are extracted intact into natural emulsion. While the phospholipid-protein monolayer provides physical and chemical stability to these natural droplets, it also makes aqueous extraction possible. Existing procedures to extract oleosomes exist, however they are not sufficient scalable or sustainable. Therefore, this work considered process re-design to enable larger-scale production but did also investigate the relation between the process conditions, and the properties of the resulting emulsions.