Seligman Lecture 2005 - Food product engineering: Building the right structures

Driven by consumers' expectations and new knowledge, a paradigmatic shift is occurring in food engineering from the prior emphasis in processes and unit operations to the design of products that provide convenience, health and well-being. The structure of foods affects their sensorial, physical and transport properties as well as the bioavailability of some nutrients. Food structure is provided by nature or imparted during processing and preparation. Presently, food product engineering is stabilizing, transforming and creating edible microstructures that are desired by consumers using conventional unit operations. This paper revises the progress in the science of food materials and its contribution to the understanding of how food structures are formed from the molecular to the macromolecular level. Food product design of the future will be based on a wider scientific knowledge adopted from many disciplines and advanced tools that reduce the scale of fabrication. This poses a challenge to food engineering education. (c) 2006 Society of Chemical Industry