Soft food microrheology

Soft food materials, such as gels, pastes, emulsions and colloidal suspensions, are highly heterogeneous structures under constant dynamic interactions. For this reason, these materials frequently exhibit complicated rheological responses, many of which defy characterization by conventional techniques without disrupting their internal food microstructure. In this paper, we highlight recent advances in microrheological methods to probe rheological responses of delicate samples at the microscale. They offer a powerful new approach to characterize soft food materials in a direct and unobtrusive way. Microrheological methods promise to reveal a better fundamental understanding of the underlying structures and dynamics of soft food materials, inform novel constitutive models, and help develop new technological applications.