Food-On-A-Chip: Relevance of Microfluidics in Food Processing

As a result of rapid growth in global population, there is a high demand for increase in food supply and global food production with the aim of eliminating poverty and hunger. Nutraceuticals and Functional foods, Edible insects and processed foods are some of the new emerging foods that are being developed with the aim of eliminating hunger and providing food security across the globe. Recently, in order to improve the quality, quantity and safety of the food, innovative technologies have been developed by researchers. One such technology is Microfluidic systems which can have immense applications in the area of food processing. Microfluidics deals with the handling of extremely small volumes of fluid using miniaturized channels of dimensions ranging in few hundreds of micrometres. The interesting and unique properties of microfluidic devices are, the flow is laminar, surface-to-volume ratios will be large, capillary effects and surface tension forces at the micrometre scale enables the development of highly effective methods for the processing and analysing of complex samples. Moreover, microfluidic devices demand only low cost of fabrication, low power and chemical consumption. However, they show a great advantage in analytical performance and biocompatibility. While in food industry the application of microfluidics includes nano-particle encapsulation of essential oils, detection and monitoring of pathogens and toxins in food and water supplies, improving the food quality by micro-nano-filtration, generating novel food structures and detecting the presence of antibiotics in dairy food products. Through this chapter, we intent to discuss the fundamental concepts of microfluidics with the reported applications and on-going research in the field of microfluidic systems that are relevant to the detection of pathogens, pesticides, additives, herbicides and heavy metals in food.