Shifting from calorie dense to nutrient dense food while maintaining appealing textures remains a challenge for the food industry. By taking a holistic and multiscale view at food formulations, LowCalFood seeks to develop new formulation principles to fully decouple nutrient composition from food texture. Ultimately, LowCalFood will empower the food industry with new design rules and a digital tool to create low calorie and sensory attractive food enriched with fibres.

This project fits with Mission 4D Duurzaam en gezond voedselaanbod en consumentengedrag as it will generate precompetitive knowledge and fundamental insights in food formulation principles and design rules for healthy and appealing food. Hence, the knowledge can be valorised by project partners and other stakeholders to create new low calorie food enriched with fibres and plant proteins and with appealing structure and texture. The knowledge and innovations from this project will thereby contribute to a healthier future food supply, by addressing the combined reduction in sugars and (saturated) fats and the increase in fibres and plant-proteins. Products with high fibre content coupled with low calorie content (lower sugars and fats) can help increase dietary fibre intake while contrasting excessive energy intake associated to metabolic and cardiovascular disease. Further, depending on the food application, replacing animal proteins with plant-based proteins has the potential to improve the macronutrient composition by reducing co-nutrients such as saturated fats. This can further contribute to lower risk of metabolic and cardiovascular disease. Lastly, it is expected that the knowledge generated will enable a more flexible use of ingredients, such as less refined ones and those from upcycling of side-streams. An increased use of less refined ingredients contributes positively to the sustainability of the food system.
In specific terms, LowCalFood will contribute to the impact goal “Growing up healthy and growing old with healthy and sustainable food” of D4 described in the “theory of change” document by making the healthier choice the easy choice. This will result in a consumer behavioural change towards healthier products due to the extent of healthier foods by reformulation of the current product offerings which are accepted by the consumer.

LowCalFood addresses the issue of high sugar, (saturated) fat and calorie intake and of low fibre intake. It has been suggested that silent and gradual reformulations that maintain similar product quality and do not induce compensation or changes in consumers’ behaviour are the most effective on interventions up to date. LowCalFood aims to provide a new holistic approach to food formulation focused on exploiting ingredients interactions instead of looking at individual functionalities. Such approach lay out a basis to decouple texture from nutritional composition without compromising on sensory perception. These will also allow a more flexible use of ingredients, including less refined ones that are rich in fibres and proteins. The use of new formulation principles based on soft-matter approaches is an area of growing scientific interest but still largely unexplored within the food industry. LowCalFood will contribute to reduce such gap, thus providing new valuable tools to food manufacturers.

LowCalFood will deliver: i.) Rules for classifying ingredients according to generic physicochemical properties and methodologies to quantify such properties ii.) Mechanistic insights linking food structure to food sensory attributes based on a multi-scale approach from ingredients (molecular scale) to perception (human-scale) iii.) Science-based holistic formulation principles to design low calorie food with attractive sensory properties iv.) Proof-of-principles of low calorie (model) foods with desired sensory properties based on developed formulation principles v.) A digital reformulation tool validated by industry to design sensory attractive low calorie food