Award details

Reducing fat in processed foods using WOW emulsifications

Reference	BBS/E/F/00041982
Principal Investigator / Supervisor	Professor Peter Wilde
Co-Investigators / Co-Supervisors
Institution	Quadram Institute Bioscience
Department	Quadram Institute Bioscience Department
Funding type	Research
Value (£)	14,570
Status	Completed
Type	Institute Project
Start date	01/04/2006
End date	30/09/2008
Duration	30 months

Abstract

Obesity and associated chronic diseases are increasing dramatically and are likely to continue to do so unless significant changes occur within the diet of the population. Fat has the highest calorific value of the nutritional components of foods and therefore contributes significantly to the calorific intake of the population. For many foods fat is present as an emulsion and, simply reducing the fat content results in inferior sensory qualities. We will use multiple emulsion technology, to create novel emulsion structures with reduced fat content that have the same overall sensory perception as full fat emulsions. We will replace part of the oil or fat droplets with an internal water phase, thereby maintaining the same number, size and external characteristics of droplets as the standard emulsion, but with a lower overall oil/fat content. Water-in-oil-in-water (WOW) emulsions will be created under low-shear conditions using a novel approach based on cross-flow membrane emulsification (XME) to overcome the problems with conventional homogenisation processes. Cross-flow Membrane Emulsification technology will provide a low-shear homogenisation process, enabling a tighter control of emulsion droplet size distribution and therefore final emulsion stability. We will identify the key design rules governing the formation of WOW emulsion using XME, that will be used to create low-fat WOW food emulsion products which will be evaluated against standard fat emulsion products in terms of their physico-chemical and sensory characteristics. This Defra-funded LINK project has Leatherhead Food International and the Institute of Food Research as its research partners, while the industrial partners in the consortium span the food industry from ingredient suppliers to manufacturers.

Summary

unavailable

Committee	Closed Committee - Agri-food (AF)
Research Topics	Diet and Health, Technology and Methods Development
Research Priority	X – Research Priority information not available
Research Initiative	X - not in an Initiative
Funding Scheme	X – not Funded via a specific Funding Scheme

I accept the terms and conditions of use (opens in new window)

export PDF file

back to list new search