A powerful tool to visualize different ingredients

Who in the food industry isn’t talking about reformulation these days? Either for clean label or applying plant proteins? Or reduced fat, sugar or salt? However, the taste buds of your consumers stay the same. A challenge for you to improve your products. At NIZO we help global food companies to understand the performance of their reformulated products and/or ingredients. With our expertise in microstructural analysis by confocal microscopy (CLSM) we are able to perform real-time visualization of complex food matrices, such as the croissant dough shown above. CLSM is a powerful technique to visualize different ingredients and a very efficient approach to quickly scan and to tackle stability issues, tailor mouthfeel, and optimize products and processes.

One example of such a quick scan project is the reformulation of a croissant. One of our customers asked us to tailor mouthfeel and compare samples of the croissant with and without reformulation. During this project our experts analysed the representative samples of the croissant with our CLSM technique Standard fluorescent staining was applied to visualize proteins, starch and fat. This quick scan allowed our customer to tailor mouthfeel and further optimise their product. Identifying the changes in the microstructure during oral processing is of crucial importance in understanding and tailoring of mouthfeel attributes, such as creaminess, grittiness and juiciness.

Interested in a CLSM quick scan to understand the performance of your reformulated product and/or ingredients? Generally, in one day we can analyse six to eight samples.

Any questions?

José Escher is happy to answer all your questions.

More about José Meet José