Edible Soft Matter

Food is essential to life. People have become increasingly aware of the environmental impact of producing and consuming food through, e.g., greenhouse gas emissions, use of land and water resources or chemical pollution. Current challenges include feeding a growing population without damaging the planet, tackling the rise of diet-related diseases, and providing a diverse range of safe, tasty, and nutritious foods. These challenges call for a worldwide food transition towards more sustainable food products and processes. Nowadays, a successful new food product must address several criteria to meet the consumers' demands and needs: having the expected sensory properties, being nutritious and healthy, and be sustainable. Healthy foods are often associated with clean label foods comprising a reduced number of natural ingredients, and no artificial ingredients or synthetic additives, and to foods less rich in lipids (especially saturated fat from animals), salt and sugars. Sustainability throughout the whole value chain of food systems is a global issue, covering notably food production, transport, processing, distribution, marketing and consumption (as acknowledged in the EU Green Deal and Farm to Fork strategy). Sustainable and healthy food implies notably a transition from a diet rich in animal-based ingredients towards a diet enriched in plant-based ingredients. This is the challenge behind the Edible Soft Matter (ESM) project. Understanding, designing and producing the innovative food of tomorrow requires a fundamental knowledge of the functional properties of novel raw food materials and ingredients, of the way these food ingredients interact, assemble and respond to chemical, physical, and mechanical processes to form complex multiscale, multicomponent materials, with targeted properties. Major advancements require going beyond trial and error approaches to formulate new foods and to gain a detailed knowledge of the multiscale/multicomponent interplay and the impact on the structure/functionality relationships using food science and soft matter science. The fundamental concepts, scientific approaches and technical tools developed in soft matter science are uniquely adapted to address these requirements. The main building block of foods, namely proteins, polysaccharides and lipids, present intriguing analogies with the main building blocks of any soft materials, namely colloids, polymers and surfactants. Furthermore, texture as well as human sensory perception can be understood as a complex interplay between the multiscale structural and mechanical properties of a product. Soft matter science is a key scientific field to unveil this interplay but also its link to sensory evaluation and to elucidate and tailor the intricate structure-function relationship in foods. The ambition of ESM is to bring upstream advancements in various aspects related to the needed transition towards plant-based food using food science in conjunction with fundamental soft matter science. Soft matter science has been tremendously successful in tackling several complex problems involving multicomponent materials with a wide range of length and time scales through statistical physics, scaling laws and multiscale description. It therefore provides unique perspectives for the interpretation of the complexity of foods and for a rational design of new foods. The ESM consortium believes that combining tools and concepts from a soft matter approach to those of food science is key to making major advances. This frontier science will deliver novel experimental and modelling tools for the food science community, uncover a mechanistic understanding of structural and functional diversity of edible soft materials and provide a paradigm shift in the design of innovative foods.