Sucrose ester surfactants: current understanding and emerging perspectives

TL;DR

This review summarizes current knowledge on sucrose ester surfactants, highlighting their phase behavior, aggregation properties, and potential as sustainable ingredients in various colloidal systems for food, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of sucrose ester surfactants' phase behavior, aggregation, and recent research, emphasizing their emerging applications and future research directions.

Findings

SEs have versatile hydrophilic-lipophilic properties influenced by esterification degree.

SEs' phase behavior can be tailored by fatty acid chain length.

Recent studies demonstrate SEs' effectiveness in emulsions, foams, and oleogels.

Abstract

Sucrose esters (SEs), derived from sucrose and fatty acids, are biodegradable and non-toxic surfactants increasingly favored as substitutes for petrochemically-synthesized ones in food, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals. SEs provide versatile hydrophilic-lipophilic properties, determined by the degree of sucrose esterification ranging from one to eight. The length of the fatty acid residues further influences the phase behavior of SEs, allowing creation of tailored formulations for specific applications. This review provides insights about our current understanding of the SEs phase behavior, their aggregation in aqueous and oily solutions, and its correlation with formulation outcomes. Furthermore, an overview of recent studies investigating SEs in various colloidal systems, incl. emulsions, foams, oleogels, and others, is provided. Novel concepts are discussed alongside future research directions, emphasizing the SEs potential as sustainable, functional ingredients.