Microfluidics for food science and engineering

The advent of microfluidics as a research field radiating towards all other material science disciplines triggered a number of paradigm shifts, which changed visibly the research horizon in food science. Food engineering as a discipline, which was sometimes criticized for the conservatism of its approaches and aspirations, started finding some important benefits from using microfluidics as a research accelerating, idea testing, and micro-scale prototyping provider of tools, allowing to probe the relationship between microstructure and end material properties, and building adequate design rules. This short review will attempt to demonstrate this by taking examples in food structure design with: emulsion and foam stability studies; structures with complex interfaces; controlled delivery systems; analytical approaches and tools based on microfluidics.