Project
Structured plant-based products with scalable and economic technologies
While plant-based meat analogues have improved significantly in quality in recent years, they remain relatively expensive. In order to avoid that these products remain an exclusive luxury for relatively high-economic status consumers, it is essential that lower-cost, accessible technologies will be identified. Current and in-development technologies used for structuring plant proteins —extrusion, shear cell, and 3D printing—are limited with respect to throughput, and require high investment. Highmoisture extrusion for meat analogue production has a typical throughput of 300-500 kg/h and has high investment costs, shear cell is not on the market yet, and 3D printing is only available at small scale.
This project asks the question: can we use food technologies that are already applied in food industry to make layered structures, with for example, technology used for puff pastry, mozzarella, or pasta? Could this also be a strategy to stimulate production at small scale (e.g. at local bakery or
butcher) and at large scale in a cost-effective manner? Which knowledge development on ingredientprocess-product interaction requires this?
This project combines protein knowledge (protein sources, other ingredients, structuring processes) with standard food processing technologies to create affordable meat analogues from small scale (local processing) to large scale (industrial processing).