Replacing fat is rarely a one-for-one exercise, food scientists warn

Developing new sources of fat is only part of the challenge facing food manufacturers, with crystallization, melting behavior, emulsion stability and interactions with the wider food matrix all determining whether an alternative will actually work in a finished product.

That was one of the key messages from Alternative Fats and Future Technologies: Unlocking Performance, Resilience, and Scale, a Protein Production Technology International webinar held on 10 September 2026 in partnership with AAK.

Francisco Arévalo, Team Lead Global Customer Innovation – Plant Based Foods & Dairy at AAK, and Lutz Großmann, Assistant Professor in the Department of Food Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, highlighted how replacing an established fat can affect everything from processing and structure to flavor release and the way a product behaves during cooking. “That’s rarely, if ever, a one-to-one substitution,” Arévalo said.

• Fat replacement is rarely a straightforward one-for-one substitution
• Crystallization, melting and interactions with other ingredients can determine product performance
• Recreating adipose tissue in meat alternatives requires structure as well as the right lipid composition

The challenge is particularly clear in dairy and dairy-alternative applications, where fat contributes to multiple aspects of the finished product. In ice cream, for example, the thermal and crystallization properties of the fat influence processes including freezing and churning. In cheese, changing the fat can affect melting, flavor release, creaminess and physical properties such as grating and slicing.

Arévalo said the question therefore needs to extend beyond whether a new ingredient can simply replace milk fat or another established source. “We’re not just looking into milk fat replacement, but also the functionality and the performance in the final product,” he said.

One misconception Arévalo highlighted is that fat has relatively little interaction with the rest of a food matrix. In practice, those interactions can have a major influence on the performance of the finished product. The formation and stability of emulsions, interactions between fats and emulsifiers, and the physical structures created within a formulation can all affect both functionality and sensory properties.

Whipped dairy products provide a good example. Fat does not simply contribute richness; it plays an important structural role in forming the network that stabilizes air within products such as whipping cream. That means changing the fat can alter the behavior of the whole system.

For manufacturers assessing emerging fats, fatty-acid composition or melting point alone may therefore reveal relatively little about how an ingredient will perform in an actual formulation. The product itself remains the ultimate test. Arévalo said consumers are not necessarily demanding a perfect one-for-one replica of an existing product, but they do expect the alternative to deliver an enjoyable experience. Taste remains central, alongside texture, melt and other sensory characteristics.

The problem becomes different again in meat alternatives. Großmann said one reason these applications are particularly challenging is that conventional meat is made from different types of tissue rather than a homogeneous mixture of protein and fat. “You have muscle tissue, you have connective tissue and then you have adipose tissue,” he said.

Adipose tissue itself is also more complicated than a pocket of lipid. It contains fat, water and connective tissue arranged into a physical structure. Replicating its behavior therefore requires more than choosing an oil with the correct fatty-acid profile. “If you want to mimic that, you need to have some sort of structured lipid system that is able to retain its structure during cooking and doesn't just melt out,” Großmann said.

This is particularly important in products intended to resemble whole cuts, where visible fat distribution and marbling form part of the eating experience. If the lipid system simply melts and escapes during cooking, both juiciness and the visual structure of the product can be lost. Oleogels and emulsion gels are among the technologies being investigated to give liquid oils a more tissue-like structure. Such systems can be designed to behave more like adipose tissue while allowing manufacturers to use oils with desirable nutritional or sustainability characteristics. But producing a structured fat is only one part of the problem. “You can make a nice oleogel or an emulsion gel that mimics adipose tissue,” Großmann said.

Getting that structure into a meat-alternative matrix without destroying it can be considerably harder. For a burger or other comminuted product, a structured fat can potentially be chopped into pieces and mixed with the protein matrix. Whole-cut alternatives create a more difficult engineering challenge. High-moisture extrusion is widely used to produce fibrous structures from plant proteins, but the conditions inside an extruder are not particularly friendly to carefully structured fats. The barrel exposes ingredients to high temperatures and shear before the material enters a cooling die, where the characteristic layered, fibrous structure develops. If fat is introduced into the barrel, Großmann explained, it can melt and become dispersed through the protein matrix as small droplets.

The fat may still contribute to the finished product, but the distinct layers or pockets associated with marbling can disappear. That leaves researchers with a different question: not simply how to structure the fat, but when and where to introduce it into the process. Großmann said his group at UMass Amherst is working on co-extrusion approaches designed to address that problem and create more distinct fat structures alongside fibrous protein. The work illustrates how the next generation of fat innovation may depend as much on food processing and ingredient delivery as it does on producing new lipids.

Fermentation could expand the range of fats available to formulators further. Adam Leman, Principal Scientist, Fermentation at The Good Food Institute, pointed to oleaginous yeasts and other microorganisms capable of accumulating substantial quantities of lipid. Advances in strain development could allow producers to exert greater control over the types of fats those organisms produce. However, the genetic tools available for many industrial microorganisms remain less developed than those available for some of biotechnology's best-understood production organisms.

Leman described this as a work in progress, with considerable potential to tailor lipid profiles as the underlying biology improves. He also highlighted possibilities involving filamentous fungi and mycelial systems, where fat could potentially be incorporated into more complex structures rather than being treated purely as an isolated ingredient. That could eventually create new ways of controlling how fat behaves during cooking and how it is distributed alongside protein.

For AAK, the emergence of these approaches does not mean today's fats have suddenly stopped working. Arévalo said existing fat solutions already perform successfully across many applications. New production and structuring technologies instead give product developers additional options when trying to solve particular formulation problems.

The challenge is not necessarily to find one new fat capable of replacing an established ingredient everywhere it is currently used. Different products demand different crystallization profiles, structures, processing characteristics, sensory properties and nutritional profiles.

A fat that performs well in an ice cream may be unsuitable for cheese. A lipid system that works in a burger may not survive high-moisture extrusion. And an ingredient with an attractive fatty-acid composition may still fail if it interacts poorly with the rest of the formulation.

As new fat technologies move closer to commercialization, their success could therefore depend on understanding the food around them just as much as the way the fats themselves are produced.

The discussion formed part of PPTI’s Alternative Fats and Future Technologies: Unlocking Performance, Resilience, and Scale webinar, produced in partnership with AAK on 10 September 2026. If you missed the live broadcast, sign up to watch the complete session on demand by clicking here

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