In response to the growing demand for delicious and affordable plant-based alternatives, Wageningen Food & Biobased Research (WFBR) is proud to announce the launch of FLAVOUR-AI, an innovative AI-empowered fermentation screening approach designed to optimize flavour profiles in plant-based products.
Creating tasty plant-based alternatives has long posed challenges in the food industry, with traditional methods often falling short in both flavour and cost-efficiency. This has led to increased consumer dissatisfaction and limited repeat purchasing.
Natural fermentation offers significant potential for developing rich and complex flavours, paving the way for improved plant-based offerings. As an example, one common challenge in plant-based foods is the presence of undesirable “beany” or “oxidation” flavours, primarily caused by aldehydes and ketones. Natural fermentation can reduce these off-flavours through microbial conversion to alcohols, as the flavour threshold of alcohols is approximately 50 times higher than that of the corresponding aldehydes.
While natural fermentation offers a possible solution to improving the flavour of plant-based products it is a risky and challenging process to manage. Complex volatile flavour profiles are typically made up of tens to hundreds of molecules, identifying the optimum combination of substrate, microbe and fermentation conditions to deliver a desired flavour profile can take hundreds or thousands of tests to identify. Fermentation processes can often result in improvements to one part of a flavour profile while generating new negative impacts in another part of the profile. The time and risks associated with fermentation for flavour mean that few companies are currently willing to invest in the process.
Wageningen Food & Biobased Research ‘s FLAVOUR-AI addresses these challenges by streamlining the fermentation process. The tool rapidly analyzes and optimizes combinations of substrates, microbes, and enzymes, maximizing research efficiency, de-risking the process and expediting the path to exceptional taste. By quickly identifying high-potential samples, FLAVOUR-AI enables experts to focus their efforts on the most promising candidates.
“FLAVOUR-AI represents a significant advancement in the field of fermentation when developing plant-based products,” said Dr. Martijn Bekker, Expertise Leader Microbial Cell Factories within WFBR. “By harnessing the power of AI, we are not only improving the flavour of plant-based products and enhancing the overall consumer experience, but we are also achieving cost efficiency in both the R&D process and production process”.
Wageningen Food & Biobased Research invites food manufacturers, product developers, and researchers to explore the capabilities of FLAVOUR-AI and join the movement toward creating better tasting plant-based alternatives by unlocking the full potential of natural fermentation.
For more information about FLAVOUR-AI and its applications in flavour optimization, please visit www.wur.eu/flavour-ai
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