Globally competitive processing technologies for meat alternatives

Climate change, natural resource scarcity, and fast-growing world population is threatening our access to nutritious, safe, and affordable food, and the protein supply chain is the most critical. The EXPRO ecosystem is built to promote the export of plant-based food innovations and thus, contributing to reduce meat consumption with a subsequent positive impact on food system sustainability. The EXPRO team with complimentary expertise will deliver knowledge and innovations that will contribute to building the competitive edge of the Finnish food industry on international markets of meat alternatives.

EXPRO will specifically identify and assess new alternative protein ingredients from underutilized plant sources (e.g. legumes, oilseed press-cakes, cereal side-streams) for the development of efficient processing approaches to integrate them into high-quality meat alternatives. EXPRO will develop knowledge-based strategies for high sensory quality meat alternatives by specifically focusing on flavour design and structure formation during wet extrusion.

EXPRO research includes a strong consumer viewpoint since consumer acceptance of a new food product dictates its market success. Unacceptable sensor quality (flavour and mouthfeel) results in low acceptance and failure in the market, thus, tackling the sensory quality gaps is in the core of EXPRO research. Morever, a succesful market introduction requires identification of the most potential target groups and the added-value of the new product for those particular groups. Thus, EXPRO will systematically screent the European market to define the target consumers for meat substitutes, factors that predict consumer acceptance, and added-value generation within the target groups.