OLEOPROTEINS: A NEW CLASS OF FUNCTIONAL INGREDIENTS FOR NATURAL/CLEAN LABEL APPLICATIONS

We consumers increasingly demand processed foods with clean labels (i.e., food with few and familiar ingredients), and are not willing to forfeit high standards for food safety, quality, and shelf life. This puts a tremendous amount of pressure on the food industry to develop natural / recognizable ingredients to remove synthetic / unfamiliar. This is difficult when 84% of the flour used across packaged foods comes from wheat and 95% of plant protein ingredients are either soy- or gluten-based.This project seeks to createnew functional ingredient, so called oleoproteins, from the stable interaction between food proteins and lipids. Members of the Harte lab showed that processing condition leading to the dispersion of naturally occurring quaternary structures (e.g., caseins from milk) in the presence of lipids, yielded stable functional ingredients. In this project, we will determine processing stimuli, protein, and lipids leading to the formation of stable oleoproteins, the types of interaction and scale explaining oleoprotein formation, and establish the range of functionality can be obtained from the novel oleoproteins.Our ultimate goal is to create a new category of natural and sustainable functional ingredients, that can be used by the food industry to manufacture high quality, clean-label, processed foods.