Precise formation of food applied Pickering droplets and microspheres using microfluidic technology

Droplets and microspheres have broad applications in food fields. However, the droplets and microspheres prepared by traditional methods exhibit poor monodispersity, wide size distribution, and inhomogeneous morphology. In this study, we prepared Pickering droplets and microspheres via microfluidics to improve the controllability. The droplets showed a narrow size distribution, with coefficients of variation (CV) below 4.5 %. CNC-stabilized droplets achieved an average diameter of 92.23 ± 4.62 μm. Furthermore, sodium alginate (SA) was introduced to crosslink with Ca²⁺ to form microspheres. The microspheres exhibited moderate deformation-resistant hardness while maintaining elastic supportive properties. Their absolute difference between the area-to-circumference ratio (ACR) and 1 (i.e., |ACR - 1|) was less than 0.035, demonstrating the high uniformity. Overall, we provided a microfluidics method to prepare droplets and microspheres, which greatly enhanced its homogeneity and controllability. The ingredients used in our work were safe and nontoxic, which could provide insights for innovative food structure design.