Unleashing the flavour potential of plant-based foods via fermentation

FLAVOURFERM aims to optimize, demonstrate, and deploy fermentation technologies to unlock the flavor potential of plant-based foods and respond to consumer demand for tasty, nutritious, and healthy plant-based products. Precision fermentation, biomass fermentation, and traditional fermentation techniques will be optimized to improve the sensory properties (flavor and texture) as well as the protein content and bioavailability in plant-based foods. Innovative fermented foods will be developed by incorporating ingredients from the optimized fermentation techniques into food products. The production will involve animal-free recombinant casein obtained by precision fermentation, as well as fungal mycelia obtained from legume fermentation, to produce an array of novel food products in three business cases: plant-based cheese, plant-based meat, and plant-based milk. All novel ingredients and final products will be scaled-up and produced at pilot and pre-commercial scale in collaboration with industrial partners, which include both innovative SMEs and established manufacturers from different EU regions.