Personalized Nutrition - A challenging global concept and its implications on innovations in food processing

“Personalized Nutrition” (PENUT) is on the way to get one of the keywords in food research & development for the next decade. PENUT can be seen as part of a challenging concept to improve the public health status and relieve increasingly difficult to finance national health care systems particularly in the context of global demographic developments. The PENUT concept involves nutritional, material science and process engineering aspects and its major goal may be described as: development of food with nutritionand health-tailored functions for the optimal individualto target group-related wellbeing benefit. From a food process engineering perspective PENUT requires processing approaches optimizing the consumer-relevant functional characteristics of the food. Such functions are delivered by functional components (FC), the optimal delivery of their target function has to be supported by the food structure. Consequently PENUT-relevant processing requires function-tailored food process engineering.