Clean-label emulsions: valorizing food by-products and mastering the products quality – CLEVER

Reducing food loss and food waste is an important axis for improving the food chain sustainability, especially since by-products generated by the food industry represent a great deposit of renewable raw materials. A potential application for their sustainable valorization would be as stabilizing agents in Pickering emulsions (i.e. stabilized by solid particles), allowing to avoid the use of synthetic surfactants replaced by un-cracked materials. CLEVER’s objective will be to reveal the potential of vegetal food by-products powders as a renewable source of unmodified, unfractionnated and unpurified ingredients in clean-label Pickering emulsions. The project is aiming for applied research that will benefit to the whole supply chain, for various food sectors. It will benefit from the producers of the by-products (alternative way of valorization with high added-value), to the consumers (higher naturalness, easier-to-read recipes or formula, circular valorization), including the formulators of the newly created emulsions (food applications as well as cosmetics or other bioproducts). We will develop a multi-actor strategy, combining interfacial and biomaterial science, experimental design and modeling, reverse engineering from desired functional properties of the final products towards process and formulation levers, sensory science and consumer acceptance of the by-products-stabilized emulsions.