Calorimetry and thermal analysis in food science : an updated review

Food science is a domain of life science. Applications of thermal analysis and calorimetry (TAC) to food products deal with many investigation targets spanning from the characterization of the systems at molecular and supramolecular level to the description of the microbial metabolism. Food products are multi-phase and multi-component metastable systems where several processes can occur simultaneously during the preparation process and the shelf life. One therefore has to disentangle various contributions to the overall instrumental outputs, using appropriate data treatments and kinetic models, and/or results from other experimental approaches. The paper reports an updated survey of TAC applications to food products through specific examples of data treatments.