Food and beverage solutions

VTT has profound knowledge on plant-based ingredients and food design, as well as development of fermented beverages. Our expertise covers everything from raw material understanding to end product innovations. We have facilities from lab to pilot-scale, including comprehensive analytical platforms, such as sensory analysis and in vitro models.

We provide our customers with a full range of food innovation and development services for plant-based food solutions including:

• Developing ingredient and food technologies for diverse raw materials and valorisation of side-streams (e.g. cereal brans, oil press-cakes, spent grains) to develop appealing, safe, and affordable dairy and meat alternatives.
• Unique separation technologies and bioprocessing expertise as well as exceptional food pilot equipment to develop new alternative food products.
• Development of hybrid food products with fish, meat or biotechnologically produced ingredients to create the desired sensory experience.
• Pilot malting and brewing facilities to optimise the use of raw materials, fermentative organisms, and process conditions. Our facilities are also well-suited for the production of new flavourful beverages.  

VTT offers versatile expertise in industrial biotechnology that allows us to harness microbes and enzymes for food and beverage development as well as transition to cellular agriculture. Our services include development of microbes and enzymes from design and screening to pilot-scale production and application testing. We utilise our top-level strain development and engineering tools.

Using biotechnology and bioprocesses we focus on:

• Creating novel cellular agriculture solutions. We develop technologies to exploit microbial and cell culture biomass as food (single cell protein, plant cells) and ingredient (e.g. protein, lipids, pigments) production by precision fermentation.
• Providing benefits to our clients by using our extensive culture collection with multiple strains of bacteria, yeasts, fungi, and plant cell cultures.  
• Harnessing enzymes and microbes as key tools in improving production and modification of ingredients and food design.  
• Offering multifunctional starter mixtures as a tool to produce novel products with desired nutritional and technological properties. We use a range of non-GM development techniques to create improved strains applicable in food and beverage (including brewing) processes.

We offer multidisciplinary expertise that aggregates and analyses big data from R&D, suppliers, manufacturers, and consumers to enable the development of innovative food manufacturing processes and services. We focus on smart ingredient and food design, both for plant and cellular agriculture -based solutions, by using modelling and data analytics combined with new measurement technologies.

With our approach, we integrate agility into the R&D and industrial production processes to improve both resource and cost efficiency and advance circular bioeconomy practices. We combine information and sensing technologies into automated processing units to develop personalised solutions for unique eating experiences.

Our agile food design expertise includes:

• Innovative sensing technologies for collecting information from the environment, processes, products and packaging, and people.
• Data mining and analysis to boost process efficiency and efficacy especially in designing new animal alternative ingredients and foods  
• Developing predictive modelling and measurement tools for ingredient and food design
• Designing new, personalised personalised food production and services concepts to promote individual wellbeing. For example, on-demand customised snack production (baked, spoonable, and drinkable). 

VTT’s solid understanding of the microbiomes, behaviour of microbes and food matrices, as well as factors affecting product safety serve as the basis of our food safety development work.

• Our main objective is to measure, understand, and control microbes and their interactions in various processes to achieve more controlled process management and improved food safety. We apply various conventional microbiological methods and molecular approaches to study the complexity, behaviour, and activity of microbial populations in raw materials as well as during processing and in the final products.
• We have expertise in process hygiene development, e.g., the optimisation of biofilm disinfection control procedures and the development of process hygiene solutions for our customers.
• VTT has expertise in combining various traditional food processing methods with biological processing methods. Microbial starters and protective cultures have been combined with other alternatives such as heat treatment, modified atmosphere, and natural preservatives to improve food safety and products’ shelf-life.