Food products combine a variety of molecular architectures and physical phases leading to the formation of unique structures responsible for specific textures and mouthfeel. The food texture is mainly controlled by the molecular assemblies on a different length scales from the molecular interactions and structural assembly to the bulk network arrangement. These structures can be harnessed to improve food nutritional value by replacing harmful ingredients, such as saturated fat, while maintaining preferable textural attributes and consumer experience. The talk will focus on the development, characterization and utilization of structuring methods to form new food systems with unique nutritional and textural attributes. More specifically, the use of oil and water structuring approaches with proteins, polysaccharides, and low molecular weight oil gelators to formulate bigel system will be presented. The effect of various preparation conditions will be presented with respect to stability and hardness where a significant impact was related to the structuring agent concentration and the homogenization time. Bigel structural, thermal and rheological properties was examined using different emulsifiers with different HLB value in order to evaluate the role of each component on the final gel functionality. The results demonstrate the importance of the interface content in O/W bigel systems, providing an effective way to alter and control the bigel’s bulk properties. Overall, bigel systems can enrich the nutritional profile of high saturated fat materials aiming to improve the consumer health and wellbeing, while maintaining consumption experience.

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