Ainia’s FerVeLact II project develops cheeses, yogurts and milk with plant sources from the Valencian Community
VALENCIA, 29 Oct. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Ainia technology center is working on a project to create new analogues to dairy products – milk, yogurt and cheese – from traditional vegetables from the Valencian Community such as tiger nuts, lupines, almonds and flax, as well as designing new advanced ingredients to improve the flavor, texture and nutritional properties of existing substitutes.
The demand for alternatives to classic dairy products has been growing for years and this increase poses a “technical challenge” to the agri-food industry to “offer new alternative analogue products to those of animal origin, but that resemble their sensory and nutritional properties, as well as as new ingredients with technological properties that help to achieve this goal,” as Natalia Aparicio, Ainia’s Food Industries technician, explained to Europa Press.
“All of this gives rise to great opportunities both for the agricultural producers of the Valencian Community as suppliers of plant raw materials, as well as for the rest of the agri-food business fabric, as there is a wide margin for improvement, an important opportunity for innovation and a demand in constant growth,” highlighted the expert.
In this framework, Ainia has been working since 2021, first on the FerVeLact I project and, now, on its second part FerVeLact II, two initiatives supported by Ivace and the Feder funds. Aparicio has highlighted that the objective is, on the one hand, to develop new products analogous to dairy products from local plant sources, and at the same time to design new advanced ingredients “aimed at overcoming the sensory, nutritional and technological limitations detected in these raw materials.” .
In this second part of the project, FerVeLact II, Ainia experts have focused on “addressing different technological avenues for the design of new improvement ingredients in order to remedy sensory and nutritional deficiencies and thus advance the development of dairy analogues with improved sensory and nutritional properties”. They have also continued to delve deeper into the optimization of processing technologies to produce new foods.
Thus, FerVeLact II has made it possible to design vegan food structures “improved in terms of their sensory and nutritional profile: vegetable smoothies analogous to milk, and fermented analogues to yogurt and cheese.”
Along with these new ingredients, they have also used native vegetable raw materials from the Valencian Community “with outstanding nutritional value, specifically, almond, lupine, tiger nut, and flax, both individually and in combination” and in different formats to select “those most appropriate for each type of development.
As Aparicio has stressed, the acceptance of these products by consumers is “essential” so that they can be a real alternative to dairy products. For this reason, throughout both parts of FerVeLact, “sensory analyzes have been carried out on each and every one of the prototypes developed.”
The structured fats generated by the researchers were incorporated into the analogue foods developed “managing to improve and resemble the sensory characteristics of dairy products, such as palatability and creaminess, while improving their nutritional composition thanks to their unsaturated fat profile.”
The application of supercritical CO2-deodorized plant ingredients “contributed to achieving improved technological and sensory properties in dairy analogues.” With regard to recombinant casein, yeast strains have been obtained as casein production platforms, and the process for obtaining them on a laboratory scale has been defined and, therefore, without the need to use animals.
The FerVeLact II project has made it possible to “model the fermentation processes of cheese-like products using computational biology tools”, which has made it possible to define “the most appropriate fermentation conditions to direct these processes to the generation of volatile compounds widely related to the aroma and flavor of cheeses of animal origin, thus improving the sensory profile of the designed products”.
All of this has allowed researchers to “delve into the various technologies used to obtain advanced ingredients, as well as those technologies used in the production of new products, such as preconditioning and processing technologies, fermentative technologies, and different production tools.” monitoring as computational biology”.
Ainia has had the collaboration of the Valencian companies Tigernuts, Monvital, and Alnut, which have contributed to the evaluation of the ingredients and foods developed, also providing information on their potential industrialization.
