3. Some examples of industrial applications

3.1 Food industry

France's leading industrial sector, the agri-food industry covers a wide range of activities: breeding and seed improvement, animal and plant material processing, food engineering and preparation, packaging. This sector increasingly calls on research, in particular to improve manufacturing techniques and ensure the final quality of products brought to market.

For several years now, major industrial groups have been using synchrotron light to characterize and analyze their products in great detail, for example chocolate, dairy products and food foams. Original studies on bread fermentation and baking processes have recently been carried out using microtomography, a technique that reveals the cellular architecture at very high resolution. These...