Pectin based bio-ink formulations for 3-D printing of porous foods

3-D printing represents a rapidly emerging group of technologies that is revolutionizing processing in many applications including food printing. So far materials of such food products are limited and the texture properties have been poorly characterized. A major step forward would be 3-D printing of cells or even artificial cells to yield foods with a cellular structure of arbitrary design and thus unseen texture properties. In this context, the 3-D printing of plant materials is introduced in order to obtain printed objects having properties similar to those of edible plant tissues such as mechanical properties and microstructures. The 3- D printer is based on the extrusion of bio-inks composed of a matrix material with embedded plant cells. The matrix material consisting of a low-metoxylated pectin solution binds the suspension of plant cells together and maintains the 3-D structure of the printed tissue. The cells are obtained from the maceration of tomato pericarp tissues using pectinase. Many parameters can influence those properties including the material composition (source of plant cells and bio-polymers, concentrations, presence of co-solutes, viscosity,…), the deposition mode (simple or co-axial injection), or the printing setting (deposition speed, filling pattern, size of the injection tip,…). This first study was mainly focused on the formulation of new food bio-inks and deposition strategies (simple or co-axial) in order to print in 3-D a simple object in which air bubbles have been trapped in order to provide particular porosity characterized by micro-computed tomography (μ-CT).status: publishe