Creating Delicious Plant-Based Alternatives With FLAVOUR-AI, An AI-Driven Screening Approach For Fermentation

In response to the growing demand for tasty and affordable plant-based alternatives, Wageningen Food & Biobased Research (WFBR) proudly announces the launch of FLAVOUR-AI, an innovative AI-supported fermentation screening approach designed to optimize flavor profiles in plant-based products.

Challenges of taste in plant-based food production
Creating tasty plant-based alternatives has long been a challenge in the food industry, with traditional methods often falling short in both taste and cost-effectiveness, leading to increased consumer dissatisfaction and limited repeat purchases.

Natural fermentation offers significant potential for the development of rich and complex flavours, paving the way for improved plant-based products. For example, a common challenge in plant-based foods is the presence of unwanted 'bony' or 'oxidised' flavours, mainly caused byaldehydesand ketones. Microbial conversion during fermentation can reduce these off-flavors, as the resulting alcohols have a flavor threshold approximately 50 times higher than the corresponding aldehydes.

Risk reduction in plant-based food fermentation with AI technology
While natural fermentation offers a potential solution to enhance the flavor of botanicals, it is a risky and challenging process to manage. Complex flavor profiles typically consist of tens to hundreds of molecules, and identifying the optimal combination of substrate, microbe, and fermentation conditions to achieve a desired flavor profile can require hundreds or thousands of tests.

Fermentation processes can result in improvements to one part of a flavor profile while generating new negative effects in another part of the profile. Due to the time and risks involved in fermentation for flavor, few companies are currently willing to invest in this process.

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 accelerating the path to exceptional taste. By quickly identifying promising samples, FLAVOUR-AI allows experts to focus their efforts on the most promising candidates.