New textures to promote the efficient use of ressources for food

by Alvaro Charlet

We want to design new textures to enhance the tasting expirience of plant-based meat alternatives. Our mission is to provide a mean for consumers to maintain their culinary heritage, while adopting a more sustainable source of nutrition. With our technology, we aim to produce novel meat analogs possessing a more heterogenous composition and texture. Through this innovation, we want to promote the development of a wider range of meat-like products that mimic the structure and composition of whole-cuts. Such textures can be fabricated thanks to our bio-inspired granular fabrication method, that mimics the heterogeneity in composition on the 10-100 µm length scale found in natural soft tissues. We aim at becoming a leader in the processing of second-generation textured meat alternatives, while developing our in-house key ingredients. This will enable us to bring added value to the production chain, starting from valuable ingredients such as fermentation derived fats, all the way to precision processing methods for the fabrication of final products.

 
We believe that our idea of granularizing ingredients from different streams and combining them into new types of food with well defined textures and microstructures will enable to make them healthier and tastier.
 
 
 
End-consumers that enjoy a high level of textures similar to the ones found in animal meat, but that feel bad about the environmental impact of their consumption.
 
 
 
Yes it does, because it will convince more customers to consume more often alternatives to traditional meat, reducing the environmental impact of our broken food system.
 
 
 
I bring both the scientific expertise and the entrepreneurial approach to our project.
 
 
 
We would need a pilot product that we can give to people for them to taste. This is a required step in the foodtech sector to launch a project, because despite of the scientific side of a project, food remains very emotional. For this reason, we need to prove that our solution brings emotions to consumers as they eat it.
 
 

Our next step with this funding will be the production of a batch of our formulated product, and start to present it to the general public, e.g. during an event or at the market. This will enable us to get highly valuable feedback, and to prove our hypothesis of the role of texture in new plant based products.