Morphing foods: recent progress and future innovations

In everyday life, foods often change shape upon heating through processes such as shrinking, swelling, or puffing, but these responses are usually naturally occurring and uncontrolled, reflecting the interplay between structure, moisture transport, and thermal effects. Morphing foods apply these principles intentionally, using designed material heterogeneity and surface geometric modifications to achieve predictable and controllable shape transformations during processing. In this review, we critically examine recent progress in stamping, 4D food printing, surface cutting, and bilayer lamination as fabrication strategies for controlled morphing in real food systems. This work emphasises the underlying mechanism, constraints, and relative industrial readiness of different morphing approaches. Together, these perspectives position morphing foods as an emerging direction in food materials design with implications for functionality, sustainability, and consumer experience. • Food structures naturally deform during processing under heat and moisture effects. • Shape changes in foods, though often overlooked, strongly influences visual appeal. • Stamping, 3D/4D printing, cutting, and lamination enable precise food morphing. • Morphing foods embodies engineering and creativity toward sustainable food design.