Microfluidic Chips in Food Science: From Principles to Applications and Beyond

Abstract The microfluidic has emerged as a promising platform to manipulate the fluid in micro scale. It has been widely used in multiple fields, e.g ., biomedical engineering, analytical chemistry, environment detection, and drug screening. Recently, the application of microfluidic chip has been extended to the food science. The microfluidic chip can be used to fabricate food delivery systems, e.g ., emulsions, lipid vesicles, microparticles, and microcapsules. These systems encapsulate the bioactive substances that are highly nutritious but sensitive to environmental factors. Another application of microfluidic chip in food science is to detect food hazards. It has exhibited several advantages, such as portability, ease to manipulate, low cost, and low sample consumption. Moreover, the nutrition delivery systems show excellent performances in monodispersity, size uniformity, and also stability. The microfluidic chip for food science has attracted considerable attention and is still developing rapidly. To make this novel technique well-known to the researchers in this field, we summarized the advances of microfluidic technology in food science, including the design of microfluidic chips, and the detailed applications. At the end, we proposed the current challenges and possible solutions, and prospected the future development.