Some of the most valuable food ingredients can also be among the hardest to handle. Oils rich in polyunsaturated fatty acids, including DHA and ARA, are sensitive to oxygen, heat and other conditions encountered during food processing and storage. When they oxidize, nutritional quality can decline and unwanted flavours and odours can develop. Finding better ways to protect these oils could make functional ingredients easier to use across future food and nutrition products.
Building a Protective Shell Around Oil
The filing describes a way to package oil inside tiny, stabilized particles designed to protect it from its surroundings [EP4781832A1]. Rather than simply adding sensitive oil directly to a food, the approach first creates an oil-in-water emulsion, where microscopic oil droplets are dispersed in water.
The inventors then use differences in electrical charge to build a protective polymer shell around the emulsion. A positively charged polymer binds with negatively charged hydrocolloids in the emulsion, forming a core-shell microparticle. The shell can subsequently be stabilized and additional layers can be added, creating a multilayer structure.
The result is a microscopic delivery system designed to help keep the oil contained during conditions such as mechanical stress, temperature fluctuations and exposure to oxygen. The filing also describes microparticles containing large numbers of tiny oil droplets within their core.
The potential applications extend across food, feed, nutraceutical and other formulations. In food applications, the technology could help incorporate sensitive oils while reducing some of the sensory and stability challenges associated with oxidation.
CUBIQ FOODS and the Future of Fats
CUBIQ FOODS was a Spanish food-tech company focused on technologies for fats and oils, including structured fats and microencapsulated Omega-3 ingredients.
This filing reflects that broader focus by addressing a practical challenge around functional oils: keeping them stable and usable from formulation through processing and storage.
Celebrating the Inventors
Congratulations and a warm thank you to the inventors: Raquel Revilla Sánchez, Sara Borrego González, Jackeline Quispe Vargas, and Andrés Montefeltro, for developing an interesting approach to protecting sensitive oils and expanding the possibilities for their use in food and nutrition.
I am Nidhi Mote, a biomedical scientist and science communicator with a PhD where I spent years building tiny 3D models of blood vessels (because apparently regular-sized biology wasn't complicated enough). My background sits at the crossroads of bioengineering and cell biology and these days I channel that into writing about the futures being quietly built in labs, from cellular agriculture to next-gen biotech. I care about making science legible, exciting, and maybe even a little beautiful which is why I am equally likely to reach for a pen as I am a pipette. When I am not writing, I am doodling diagrams that probably explain things better than my words do. Based in Hamburg, always happy to talk about tissue engineering, cellular agriculture, and connect with like-minded folks.
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This article is based on publicly available information. Lab Grown Technologies is not affiliated with the inventors or organizations mentioned.
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