Recently, researchers from Innovation Team of Plant Protein Structure and Function Regulation in Institute of Food Science and Technology, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (IFST-CAAS), has explored the properties of high internal phase Pickering emulsions as edible inks in thermosensitive 3D printing. The related research results were published in the international TOP journal Food Hydrocolloids (IF=11.0). Chao Wu, Research Assistant of IFST, is the first author of the paper, and Prof. Aimin Shi is the corresponding author. This research is supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2022YFF1101400) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32172149).

High internal phase Pickering emulsions have significant advantages in delivering actives and as fat substitutes, and have attracted attention as 3D printing inks in recent years due to their suitable viscosity and mechanical strength. The researchers used gel fragmentation method to construct hybrid microgel particles based on soybean isolate protein, and with the help of chitosan to significantly improve the wettability of the particles, they prepared highly stable O/W-type high internal phase Pickering emulsions. By controlling the contents of oil and particles to make the high internal phase Pickering emulsion with excellent structural support ability and thixotropy, it can better recover the structure after extrusion and endow the print modeling with higher accuracy. In particular, when the oil content was 75% and the particle concentration was 3.0%, the accuracy and stability reached 97.88% and 99.23%, respectively. The introduction of curcumin and NaHCO3 during the post-print heating process led to the color change from yellow to reddish-brown, thus realizing the thermosensitive 3D printing with the color change driven by the temperature change.

This study provides new ingredients and new ideas for the development of personalized 3D/4D printed custom food products based on food-grade high internal phase Pickering emulsions.

Link to original article: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodhyd.2024.110833