A MODEL OF FOOD SPREADABILITY FROM FLUID MECHANICS

Abstract

Subjective spreadability was predicted through understanding of psychophysical mechanisms involved during the back and forth spreading action of foods on crackers. Transient complex Theology of food products is incorporated into mass and momentum balances used to model the spreading action. Furthermore, because the consumer is in contact with the food product through a knife, it is assumed that the inverse of the torque needed to generate the deformation is assessed as spreadability. Torque is assumed to be equal to the shear stress on the knife multiplied by the distance the knife traueled across the cracker. Because this distance is constant, the final form for the psychophysical model is: image Using magnitude estimation, subjective spreadability scores ranged from 0.13 for marshmallow cream to 5.23 for squeeze margarine. When these scores were plotted versus the model on log‐log coordinates, the best slope was 0.85 with a correlation coefficient of 0.95. The results strongly support the assumption that shear stresses generated on the knife are assessed as spreadability by the consumer.