Impact of freezing and thawing processes on wheat and potato starch gel syneresis

With the globalization of the market, food industries need to adapt their processes to establish their presence in far away countries. Long transports are problematic for fresh food products as they drastically reduce the already short shelf life. To counter this problem, the idea to freeze food for ransport and thaw it on arrival could be an alternative solution to propose an acceptable shelf life to the consumer. This brings new challenges as although freezing is thoroughly mastered, thawing is not. The main visible alteration of thawing is a water syneresis phenomenon leaving the product unfit for consumption. Indeed, water affects foods at several levels such as safety, stability, quality, and physical properties [1]. To investigate this problem, starch, a common polymer encountered in a wide variety of food, seemed to be a good model in gel form considering the three main food complexity dimensions which are: compositional, structural, and dynamical complexity [2, 3].