What's the Problem?
As consumers have gotten more health conscious and look for sustainable food options, a new group of dairy products has been successfully commercialized across the globe, that are based on plants. However, these products still fail to mimic the functional and nutritional properties of conventional dairy products. Plant based-dairy companies often find it challenging to successfully create value-added alternative products such as cheeses and ice creams. This is the biggest challenge the industry is facing today to meet the demands of a growing number of consumers that are eager for these kinds of products.
How are they Solving it?
We are building a filamentous fungi platform to produce complex and stable dairy proteins. The wide range of side streams generated from agro-industrial activity in Brazil can be used as feed for the microorganism, allowing us to develop a cost-effective solution at scale. The proteins produced can be used as key ingredients to reproduce the sensory and nutritional characteristics of dairy products without the need to use conventional milk.