The past few years have seen a boom of innovative companies looking to produce food ingredients using microbial fermentation instead of via traditional agricultural means, such as plant or animal farming.
It can take months and years to grow the plants and animals that are the source of foods and ingredients used in modern food systems, yet microbes have the potential to double their biomass in a matter of hours and are capable of producing specific proteins while doing so.
Microbial fermentation has been used for years in the food industry to produce ingredients such as enzymes and in the biopharma industry.
The transformative capability of microbial fermentation is deeply rooted in human history, with evidence showing humans have been leveraging fermentation for more than 5000 years.
Will fermentation, the oldest food processing technique, power the future of the food industry?
In this webinar, our experts answer questions like:
How does fermentation work?
What are the different types of fermentation (e.g. traditional fermentation, precision fermentation, etc), and which ingredients or foods are each responsible for producing?
What are the current challenges and opportunities in fermentation?
How is fermentation science driving innovation in the food and beverage industry, and how might it become a much larger component of producing what we eat in the future?
Contributors
Jacques Georis, PhD
Senior R&I Director at Danone
With over 25 years of experience in the enzymes, bioprocess, functional and nutritional food ingredients & feed additives industry, Jacques has undertaken various technical and leadership roles. His goal within Danone R&I is delivering breakthrough innovations & processes with collective successes.
Melissa is an experienced business operations director focused on optimising end-to-end processes to drive efficiency, scalability, and sustainable growth.
Professor of Bioengineering at Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech at University of Liège
Frank's academic journey began with a PhD in bioprocess scale-up/down, where he developed stochastic models to predict the microenvironment encountered by cells in large-scale bioreactors. Frank’s research expertise is complemented by his teaching responsibilities, which include courses on mathematical modeling of dynamic systems, systems and synthetic biology, bioprocess engineering, and more applied topics such as project-based courses on the production of valuable compounds by microbes, bioreactor operations in the lab and single-cell analyses.
In the eighth annual edition of the KHNI Health and Nutrition Megatrends, we explore the breakthroughs in science, technology, product development, and evolving consumer behaviours that are reshaping global food systems.
