In food physics, connection and collaboration are ingredients for a thriving IOP community

As the food physics group of the Institute of Physics notches up 10 years of engagement between academia and industry, Joe McEntee explores how food physicists are delivering a more sustainable food system while helping manufacturers to reduce costs

Food physicists have a lot on their plate just now. Across academia and industry, the community faces systemic challenges, not least the obesity epidemic, mounting health-and-safety concerns around ultra-processed foods, and the regulatory backlash against plastic food-packaging waste.

The war in the Middle East is another uncomfortable wake-up call. While the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping has sent oil and gas prices soaring, that strategic choke point has also shut off around one-third of the seaborne trade in fertilizers, fuelling price spikes and warnings of global food shortages to come.

All these factors will intensify the push from policymakers and the public for a more sustainable “food system”. The goal is to make better use of water, energy and raw materials, while minimizing environmental impacts like deforestation and pollution.

What’s cooking?

The food-physics community is a diverse mix of senior academics, early-career researchers and R&D scientists from the food-and-drink industry. Many of them came together recently in Leeds, UK, at Food Physics X – the 10th annual conference of the food-physics group of the Institute of Physics (IOP). Top of the agenda was how the food industry can deliver nutritious and tasty products, while at the same time accelerating technology and process innovation to cut manufacturing costs and time-to-market.

“Food physics and its multidisciplinary practitioners have a key enabling role here,” says Zachary Glover, an industrial biophysicist who has chaired the IOP’s food physics group since 2021. “Collectively, the challenge lies not just in improving food security and resilience of supply, but also in supporting industry R&D initiatives towards enhanced productivity, circularity [to minimize waste] and environmental sustainability.”

Glover is optimistic about the food industry’s ability to reinvent itself, especially when it comes to addressing the growing regulatory and geopolitical challenges through new digital technologies. “AI and machine learning are already transforming best practice in research, publishing and education,” he says. “Our task as a food physics community is to leverage what these tools have to offer to boost innovation and minimize the risks of bland homogeneity in our at-scale food production.”

Yet reinvention for food manufacturers will not be easy. The path to smart manufacturing (what’s sometimes dubbed “industry 4.0”) is more of a digital evolution than a revolution – whether that’s using “cobots” to reduce physical loading during manual-handling operations or exploiting AI to control manufacturing processes.

“Nationally, there is a huge sunk cost in the food industry’s existing manufacturing asset base,” says Glover. “This cannot and will not be replaced wholesale, while economic and geopolitical factors will ultimately dictate the pace at which industry is able to disrupt itself with new digital technologies.”

Out of the lab, into the factory

Despite the conservatism of those in the food industry, academics are pressing ahead, with physics-informed AI and machine learning (PIAI and PIML) fuelling both technology push and food-process innovation. According to University of Leeds food physicist Megan Povey in her keynote presentation at Food Physics X, physicists have integrated fundamental models of transport phenomena with PIML to create hybrid model systems that are both data-efficient and physically consistent. “The payoff is a reduced reliance on costly trial-and-error experimentation,” she says.

Povey uses ultrasound spectroscopy for food characterization and ultrasound processing in food manufacturing R&D. She also focuses on the computer and mathematical modelling of foods, pointing out that PIML can now solve complex partial differential equations relevant to heat transfer, mass transfer, microbial inactivation and structural changes, even when limited data are available.

“PIML has improved the accuracy of forward and inverse modelling, accelerated virtual prototyping of food products, and increasingly supported the development of real-time digital twins [interactive computer simulations] for process optimization,” Povey told delegates at Food Physics X. She and her colleagues are putting such advances to practical use at the Leeds Food AI Lab, which brings together experts from a range of disciplines in sensing, machine learning, optimization and life-cycle assessment.

By training PIML models on food-system-relevant data generated using the lab’s “sensor-fusion” capability, the Food AI Lab and its research partners are, for example, transforming variable, low-value agri-food residues into reliable sources of sustainable protein – what’s known as “agri-food waste upcycling”. The lab also uses near-infrared spectroscopy and machine learning to detect allergens in powdered food and applies ultrasonic sensing, machine learning and Bayesian optimization to cut the cost and environmental impact of industrial cleaning processes.

“We are engaged in creating a more sustainable food industry at AI Food Lab,” Povey says. “Along the way, new measurement techniques, advances in mathematics, plus PIAI and PIML innovations will transform our understanding of the physics of food and nutrition.”   

For both Povey and Glover, who this summer ends his five-year stint as IOP food physics chair, being part of an organization that promotes and defends physics is integral to their professional identities. “With the help of our colleagues at the IOP, we weathered the COVID years with online events and have had three strong in-person annual conferences since then,” says Glover. “The feedback on our conferences is fantastic and it genuinely feels like our members want to be there, engaging face-to-face with their peers.”

For Glover, the food physics group is all about bringing like-minded scientists and engineers together, with a self-sustaining community of shared practice among the main achievements during his tenure as group chair. “Looking ahead, the group will continue to educate physicists in academia about the richness of questions in food science,” he says. “Just as important, we will engage industry scientists about the role of physics as a ‘quiet enabler’ of technology translation and food-product innovation.”

Food physics: the next generation

One notable feature of the IOP food physics group’s annual gathering is the prominence given to early-career researchers. Food Physics X in February was no different, with the work of two early-career scientists recognized by best poster awards.

Best oral poster: Molly Massey, University of Leeds, UK

The crystallization and melting behaviour of blends of cocoa-butter equivalents and milk fats using small- and wide-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS/WAXS).

The texture, gloss and shelf-life of chocolate are largely governed by fat crystallization during production, with developers’ ability to control the various crystalline forms (or “polymorphs”) of cocoa butter underpinning the quality of the end-product. However, growing demand for plant-based alternatives means that food manufacturers want to replicate the qualities of cocoa butter using cocoa-butter equivalents (CBEs).

With this in mind, Massey is using synchrotron SAXS/WAXS experiments to evaluate the role of anhydrous milk fat – traditionally used in milk chocolate to influence texture, polymorphic transitions and melting profiles – on the crystallization behaviour of CBE blends. Her long-term goal is to replicate those structural and thermal effects in dairy-free material systems that rely on milk-fat replacement blends.

Best paper poster: Ashley Roye, King’s College London, UK

Biomimetic modelling of oral mucus microstructure for understanding lubrication and taste transport.

Roye is investigating the interaction between the mouth’s salivary/mucus layers and “tastant” molecules, which are food compounds that trigger the sensation of taste. Her research focuses on how mucins (large protein molecules with carbohydrate attachments) in saliva and the mucosal lining mediate tastant transport to the taste buds and, in turn, how that process influences lubrication, mouthfeel and textural sensation of different food components.