Fat crystallization in shortenings: the effect of shear and concentration

Fat crystallization plays an important role in the functionality and sensory properties of many fat-rich food products such as shortenings. In the food industry, shortenings are produced by applying high shear rates and high cooling rates to obtain the desired organoleptic properties. It is known that changing these parameters has an impact on the final behaviour and stability of the product. In the past years, our group obtained more insights on the mesoscale to better understand these properties. Experiment A26-2-994 showed interesting results on the effect of shear and cooling in SAXS/WAXS and previous research of our group at ID02 resulted in a multi-scale analysis of palm oil and the development of a new model to fit USAXS data of fat networks. By extending our current dataset obtained at BM26 together with insights earlier obtained at ID02, a more in-depth knowledge on the fat crystallization process as such and the resulting product characteristics will be obtained.