Vinarom® positions itself as the first alternative to commercial baker’s yeast with the same ease of use and fermentative capacity. Our toolbox assembly methodology will pave the way for bakeries to develop new bread compositions and resurrect flavour diversity in country-specific, characteristic bread types, while concurrently retaining textural and rheological traits consumers and producers are accustomed to (Figure 4). As new dough handling methods like retarded or disrupted fermentation in frozen and half-baked bread, have become common practice in the baking sector, the use of S.cerevisiae as the sole leavening agent is no longer up-to-date. The baker’s yeast shows reduced colony forming units after freezing and as a result, bakers fall back to adding more yeast in dough preparation, leading to unnecessary and uneconomic amounts inside the pre-dough. Vinarom®’s excellent freeze stability will enable the European bakery sector to reduce starter culture usage in retarded dough handling preparations by up to 25%. In addition, we have studied the ability of yeasts to ferment different carbohydrate sources and developed a cultivation process based on side-streams of the food industry that allow our process to be independent of the price fluctuations of the molasses market.
While most of the flavour in bread is the result of baking in the oven, and in particular of Maillaird reactions that take place during this heating step, the sensorial characteristics are also shaped by the fermentation and choice of yeast. The foundation of the Vinarom® starter culture is built upon a strain of Torulaspora delbrueckii, which has been associated with winemaking and has been isolated from must and wine. This enables Vinarom® to form aroma components in differing quantities compared to S. cerevisiae leading to new, unique flavour sensations (Figure 5). By using available side streams of the food-industry, Vinarom® will indirectly reduce GHG-emission during the life cycle of yeasts for bread by 40%. Additionally, Vinarom® is freeze resistant and thus optimized for most recent developments in dough processing, like interrupted or retarded fermentation without resorting to over dosing, which is a common practice with standard baker’s yeast in the current market.
In 2012 1.3 million tons of baker’s yeast were produced worldwide (ECOSYS, 2015), which lead to approximately 2.7 million tons CO2 emissions (COFALEC, 2012). The majority of these emissions result from energy usage during cultivation (fermentation, concentration, cooling and storage). Apart from this, a massive fraction of CO2 emissions can be traced back to the use of molasses as nutrition medium (Figure 3). In comparison, the microorganism blend apparent in Vinarom® is assembled to use side streams of the food-industry as alternative nutrition medium. As a result, our assembled yeast blends can reduce the CO2 emissions by up to 25 % compared to conventional baker’s yeast.
