Project description
Microbial fermentation for tasty and healthy plant-based dairy
The market increasingly demands tasty and healthy plant-based dairy products. Innovative tools can enhance the fermentation industry’s ability to predict product flavour, odour and texture while also reducing pollution. With this in mind, the EU-funded DELICIOUS project aims to develop a new technology for producing affordable, tasty and nutritious plant-based dairy alternatives, such as cheese and kefir. By combining microbial products with plant-based materials, the project will encourage a shift towards plant-based diets and help lower the food industry’s environmental impact. It will focus on high-protein products enriched with vitamins, fibres and probiotics. To support commercialisation, the project will conduct safety assessments, nutritional simulations, consumer testing and techno-economic evaluations, along with developing a bioinformatics tool to predict product characteristics.
Objective
DELICIOUS proposes a novel production technology to create affordable, tasty and safe plant-based dairy analogues (cheese and kefir) with high nutritional value, by combining microbial products with plant-based raw materials. The project has the ambition to accelerate the dietary shift, acting like a paradigm for the whole plant-based food sector. DELICIOUS contributes to a better nutrition for everybody by developing products with high protein content, rich in vitamins, fibres and probiotics. The project aims also to decrease the environmental footprint of food industry not only by replacing conventional dairy products in peoples’ diets but also by introducing microbial products which acquire less fresh water, less land use and inexpensive residual raw materials. Having as starting point the perceptions of culinary experts (chefs), the project will improve the sensory characteristics of the current, commercial plant-based products in order to improve their placement in the market. To that end, we will use tailor-made microbial fat, produced via precision fermentation, yeast biomass and fibre-producing microbial strains to achieve the desired organoleptic properties without additives, artificial flavours and avoiding ultra-processing methodologies. To accelerate the commercialisation of the developed products, DELICIOUS will perform various analyses and evaluations: Safety assessments, nutrition simulations, consumers testing and technoeconomic evaluation of the processes combined with behavioural economics to define the profit and price margins for such products. Capitalising on the great capacity and experience of the consortium on High Throughput methodologies, the project has also the great ambition to empower fermentation industry with a bioinformatic tool to predict flavour, odour, and texture of a product, based on the initial raw materials and the microorganisms used in fermentation, significantly decreasing the costs of product development.
Fields of science
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-IA - HORIZON Innovation ActionsCoordinator
891 22 Ornskoldsvik
Sweden
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.