The food industry is constantly challenged to meet consumer demands for new food products that are safe, convenient, affordable, pleasurable and healthy. Especially the increasing importance of health & wellbeing from a healthcare system perspective urges food developers to accelerate their research and development work to come up with new innovative and sustainable products. Thereby, formulation science and process design play a major role. However, the impact on food structure is in many development activities today still poorly addressed and/or understood.
In order to develop and produce new tasty, nutritious and healthy food products the creation of new know-how on how to better tailor, design or modulate colloidal food structures, their interfaces and their interactions is required. Although foods are complex systems, it becomes more and more evident that applying ‘Soft Condensed Matter’ Physics concepts allows to better understand structure formation and dynamics in food materials. The main principle of applying the ‘Soft Matter approach’ in designing new food materials lays in the better understanding of the formation of ‘mesoscopic structures’ of different length scales and different dynamics.
In my talk I will first give a short introduction into main consumer trends and show how they changed over the last 2 decades or so. Then I will illustrate how the food industry is trying to react on these trends, and illustrate how the changes in trends necessitate also an adaptation of the needed research efforts, activities and focus.