The Evolution of Fats and Oils: Designing for Health and Sustainability

Designer oils and fats as the food business pursues a continuous development toward a future where the boundaries of what is possible are being pushed toward nourishing, functional, and sustainable food production.

Fremont, CA: Food technology has considerably evolved through an ongoing process of optimizing our fats and oils consumption during a period when dietary tastes are changing tremendously. This evolution is design-based in designer fats and oils-substances specifically designed to enhance food items' nutritional value, shelf life, and sensory qualities.

Development of Custom Oils and Fats

This strategy is based on the knowledge that fat is one of the most important macronutrients; it is generally derived from both plants and animals. From raw material to table, in processing, fat may be in liquid or solid form and offer a range of functional benefits in various food preparations. Scientific and technical developments are currently allowing the elaboration of fat products with improved functional qualities and nutritional profiles. Precision fermentation is one of the newest technologies driving this trend of personalized fats. It consists of bioengineering bacteria for a compound to produce. In that way, it is an effective process of producing specialty fats without the involvement of traditional sources of plants and animals. This new method of food production opens up completely new dimensions with increased sustainability and novelty.

Specific Function and Nutritional Improvement

Designer fats and oils are manufactured to impart certain specific advantages to foods, such as enhanced sensory acceptability, improved keeping quality, and enhanced processability. These lipids are also processed to provide a certain nutritional advantage, such as enhanced levels of omega-3 fatty acids. In nature, the fatty acids may be rearranged or fractionated to change their compositional structure, resulting in the development of fats with specific rheological, physical, and nutritional properties.

Tailoring Nutrition with Custom Foods

The first attempts at designer foods involved feeding hens a diet high in flaxseed and the resulting eggs were loaded with omega-3 fatty acids. One more recent example has to do with the development of different sustainable and diverse sources of omega-3s for a range of applications, from food and supplements to animal feed and aquaculture. Unlike algal and marine oils, these designer fats are sensory neutral for every additional dose of nutrition a food formulator can load into a product, and there's no sacrifice in flavor or aroma. This is an especially valuable feature for food producers looking to add omega-3 fatty acids to their product lines without compromising flavor.

Precision Digestion: A Gateway to Ecological Balance

Precision fermentation, a highly promising method for inventive and sustainable fat production, is a bioengineering technology that teaches microbes to produce desired chemicals. As the plant-based food industry continues to develop, especially in plant-based meat substitutes, the potential for disruption from such technologies could be great.

Until now, the saturated fat component of these substitutes has usually come from palm and coconut oils. These sources do raise some serious environmental issues, though. Precision fermentation produces fats that improve flavor in plant-based meats and solidify their place as eco-friendly options.