The RoseWorks story

Foodie Origins: Rethinking Food Design

A major challenge persists in the food industry. While food technology has existed for centuries, the engineering discipline is uniquely resistant rational design strategies—the practice of developing new products and processes using predictive tools.

Food belongs to a special class of soft materials, with properties that shift across scales and evolve over time. Until recently, this cascading complexity defied both theory and simulation.

But that’s changing. Over the last two decades, particle-based simulation methods have matured, finally offering a way to capture the dynamic properties of food materials.

Food is Living, Food is Changing

Food materials are living, and their bioactivity means food is always in a transient form. More often than not, this is actually a good thing.

For example, leave raw milk on the counter, and it naturally separates into cream. By the next day, it sours and curdles into yogurt. Even pasteurized milk remains bioactive, alive with microscopic changes.

Equally, how food changes during eating matters. Our brains interpret evolving flavors and textures, deciding which sensations bring pleasure and which don’t. Understanding and capturing this "active" nature of food has likely been the #1 barrier to applying rational design principles—including simulations—in the food industry.

Simulating Active Materials Was Hard (Until Now)

When I started my PhD, I was tasked with simulating food oral processing. I imagined myself spending 90% of my time devising elegant simulations to uncover the origins of food texture perception, with the remaining 10% dedicated to the gritty work of building tools and analyzing data.

In reality, I spent four years battling hacking together fragments of material science software and deciphering bloated documentation. While help forums held pockets of insight, they were overshadowed by a culture dismissive of newcomers trying to navigate complex tools.On top of that, I had to navigate the local high-performance computing (HPC) cluster*, contending with maintenance issues, unexpected downtimes, network outages, and queues for simulation slots.

It turns out, this is the common experience across the cross-discipline material science community and which has been driving up the time and cost of simulation-based research. I saw no choice but to leave academia after my PHD and to work on the tools themselves.

The Mission: RoseWorks

RoseWorks is a Computer-Aided Engineering company that gives researchers and industry flexible, on-demand access to world-class particle-based simulation tools and computing power.

While I am proud of RoseWorks origins on food, these challenges span so many disciplines. Do you have a story? Get in touch with us and let's see how we can help.

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* once a symbol of prestige, boasting an in-house HPC cluster is now an outdated practice, replaced by cheapers, more elastic and more secure cloud computing