What's Driving the Trend in the Evolution of Plant-Based Food Products?

I had the pleasure of attending the Bridge2Food Plant based summit this week. First of all, congratulations to the organization as this was a very nice digital conference. The interface was highly user friendly and you could find everything you would expect from an exhibition.

Talking about the content, every presentation was very interesting, there is a common agreement about what consumers are looking from plant-based products, which is a nutritional product, a tasty product and finally but not less important a sustainable product.

It is the consumers group Flexitarians that are the driving force behind this growing trend, as data is showing that people eating this new category of products, have not stopped eating meat or drinking milk.

These three factors are driving the whole plant-based industry and different players are getting creative in different ways to try and achieve these same goals.

Soy was the original plant-based dairy option but nowadays there are multiple options, from oat milk, which is generating the most momentum, to diverse options such as beans, nuts, grains, pulses, and seeds. Each source delivers a uniqueness, however, using a blend of ingredients can also help meeting the desired environmental and nutritional attributes.

Each blend also comes with its specific challenges regarding nutrition, process, off taste and mouthfeel. For this reason, the opportunities for innovation are huge and that explains the number of start-ups that’s have arisen with this trend in the latest years and some of them could have been represent at Bridge2Food plant-based summit.

It is an exciting time, we are talking about creating new products in the Food Industry, it is no longer just the target of copying the animal version.

Biocatalysts Ltd are here to support this new breed of food entrepreneur whether it is with our extensive range of enzymes which can be applied to different plant based sources, for helping with the functional and taste challenges, to improving process recovery to achieving a higher quality product, whilst always respecting the clean label trend that consumers are asking for. Or providing fermentation capacity to produce your novel fermented proteins, we are here to assist you in the development of your next product.