Future foods: Alternative proteins, food architecture, sustainable packaging, and precision nutrition

Abstract

There are numerous challenges facing the modern food and agriculture industry that urgently need to be addressed, including feeding a growing global population, mitigating and adapting to climate change, decreasing pollution, waste, and biodiversity loss, and ensuring that people remain healthy. At the same time, foods should be safe, affordable, convenient, and delicious. The latest developments in science and technology are being deployed to address these issues. Some of the most important elements within this modern food design approach are encapsulated by the MATCHING model: Meat-reduced; Automation; Technology-driven; Consumer-centric; Healthy; Intelligent; Novel; and Globalization. In this review article, we focus on four key aspects that will be important for the creation of a new generation of healthier and more sustainable foods: emerging raw materials; structural design principles for creating innovative products; developments in eco-friendly packaging; and precision nutrition and customized production of foods. We also highlight some of the most important new developments in science and technology that are being used to create future foods, including food architecture, synthetic biology, nanoscience, and sensory perception.

Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10408398.2022.2033683

Keywords:

• Future foods
• nanotechnology
• structural design
• sustainability

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Correction

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 21808187), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2017YFD0400200-4), the Key Research and Development Program of Shaanxi Province (No. S2022-YF-YBNY-0331) and the Innovation Talents Promotion Plan of Shaanxi Province (2020KJXX-034).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.