Pickering Emulsions for Food Applications: Background, Trends, and Challenges

Particle-stabilized emulsions, also referred to as Pickering emulsions, have garnered exponentially increasing interest in recent years. This has also led to the first food applications, although the number of related publications is still rather low. The involved stabilization mechanisms are fundamentally different as compared to conventional emulsifiers, which can be an asset in terms of emulsion stability. Even though most of the research on Pickering emulsions has been conducted on model systems, with inorganic solid particles, recent progress has been made on the utilization of food-grade or food-compatible organic particles for this purpose. This review reports the latest advances in that respect, including technical challenges, and discusses the potential benefits and drawbacks of using Pickering emulsions for food applications, as an alternative to conventional emulsifier-based systems.