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Many small and medium sized companies in Europe are creating sustainable food technologies, but these innovations aren't spreading quickly. This is on the one side because they're not well-connected to the existing food system and on the other side people are slow to change their eating habits.
Our research team from Fontys in collaboration with Maastricht University, Hogeschool van Amsterdam and Aeres Hogeschool supports designing food based on societal values. We help tell compelling stories and integrate these values into new food technologies.
We work with companies, policymakers, media, and the food service industry to make sustainable food choices more accessible. Our goal is to speed up the shift to sustainable food, and we seek partners to join us in this effort.
Welcome to the very first episode of the podcast series, how do we want to eat tomorrow? And the name of this podcast episode is the future of food is now, making protein from air and teaching microbes to build milk. Well, that's a promising title for this episode, and I'm going to talk about this with 2 guests. And at my table, I have Sonja Flotostommen. Welcome, Sonja.
Speaker 2:Hello, Ronad.
Speaker 1:And also at my table is Peter Welters. Welcome, Peter.
Speaker 3:Hello, Ronad.
Speaker 1:Okay. To kick off our conversation, Sonja, can you please introduce yourself and tell us your role within Fontis and to this project?
Speaker 2:Yeah. My name is Sonja Flotus Damen. I'm a member of the research group Business Innovation at Fontis Infenlo, and, my background is nutritional science. My role in this group is I'm a researcher who wants to facilitate the sustainable food transition.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Sonja. And, Peter, what is your role in this project?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I'm a, member of this project team, which, Sonja has started. And I'm the founder of Phytoval Green Technologies, GmbH, a small medium company, involved in biotechnology, mainly plant and microbe, biotechnology. And, as a company, I started in 1998, and, my education is, biochemist.
Speaker 1:1998. That's a long time ago.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 1:And you are a very, very early adopter.
Speaker 3:Yes. I'm a pioneer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That was the word that I was looking for. Okay. Sonia, to start with you, what makes our food system unsustainable, and why do we need to change something?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's no secret that our system is quite unsustainable because we use a lot of land, a lot of sweet water, and we emit a lot of greenhouse gases with the way we produce our food today.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And, Peter, what is your opinion about this?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Sonia is right. System is unsustainable at the moment because of our eating habits, but also, because we are doing, agriculture in a non sustainable way, and also because we are not adapting news technology for our food production.
Speaker 1:And talking about the newest technology, do you have experience or solutions, suggestions?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I did my PhD with, professor Jeff Schell, who did with, a month ago, produced the first transgenic plant in 1982, and so my PhD was 10 years later. And, so I'm, I'm also kind of a pioneer in genetic engineering of plants, and, I think that Europe has done a very bad job in, prohibit prohibiting the use of this technology.
Speaker 2:Yes. Peter mentioned already now the genome editing as one technology, but we have some others. And I would like to give you some examples that we have in mind. The plant based protein production, that is something which is already well known. We have a lot of nice products on the market.
Speaker 2:We can change now our animal based protein, sausage, for example, to a plant based sausage. It is mainly based on soy or on other corn, plants, which deliver nice proteins. However, it is a direct protein delivery without the intermediate of the animal. So this is the plant based. I don't have to explain that further, I guess.
Speaker 2:There are some others which, may be a little bit less known. We are working on the novel protein production of insects for some years already to just check what is the opportunity and the potential of insects to also be a protein source here in Europe. Globally, there is no question about that, but in Europe, it is a novel protein. So we had an approval from the food law, and now it's allowed to breed insects. We make a protein powder from it, and we process it in various products.
Speaker 2:That is the second pillar, novel proteins. Then we have a very exciting one, the cultured meat, production, which is not yet in the market here, but it is already in Singapore. And since 2023, also in the US, cultured meat meat, that means that we have just one cell from the animal, and that is fed with a liquid, a nutritious liquid, and it grows in a kind of a laboratory setting. It grows to meat, or a meat like product, which is then, easy to process in all kinds of products, which contain meat. The same is also possible for fish.
Speaker 2:So imagine what is possible in the future with this technology. I want to mention the 4th one, which is really exciting, and this is using microbes as bioreactors. They can build milk, for example, or any protein just from air. That sounds maybe a little bit simple, and I'm sure that Peter will explain it much better. But for me, it's like, plants.
Speaker 2:They have the technology of photosynthesis, so they can make, bio organic material just from the sun and water, and the c o two from the air. And the microbes, they can make with electricity, a little bit of water, and then the elements from the air, they can build biomass, proteins. And very precise. This is called precision fermentation. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think that's really exciting.
Speaker 1:Peter, you're the expert on this. We we heard 4 means of creating food for us. The first was plant based. The second was insects. The third was cultured production of meat based on one cell and also for fish.
Speaker 1:And the 4th was microbes as a mini reactor. Which one or maybe all would you like to react on?
Speaker 3:So the best example is, cheese production. So for the cheese production, we are using, usually an enzyme from from calves. So calves are, slaughtered and, the the lab ferment, is extracted from from calves and, this would then be combined with milk and, and then the milk proteins will denatured and, and cheese is produced by storing it a long time and fermenting it. But since the nineties of last century, we have a microbe based production of, this lab ferment of this enzyme, denaturing the cheese proteins. And, already at the at the beginning of the century, so in the early 2000, Novozymes said that, they are producing, so much of of this microbial protein that 70% of the world's cheese production, is made by this microbial, microbial protein.
Speaker 2:And it might also nice to mention the companies in the US and in Finland, which have invented this new technology of making proteins from air. So they have specific microbe streams, which just use the elements from the air to produce the proteins, as mentioned before. And what is interesting here is that you can teach them to produce exactly the protein that you want. For example, solene, that is a powder, a protein powder from the company in Finland, and they use this protein powder for several purposes, for example, for chocolate or for, milk products. So the protein as such is exactly the same as in milk, and it's just produced by these microbes.
Speaker 2:Oh, Peter, I really want you to tell the story about the raspberry aroma.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Okay. That is an example of activities of my company, and we have produced created a microbe, with precision farming of precision for precision fermentation, which is able to produce a very clean raspberry aroma and in the same way, it would be produced in the raspberry. So we are getting out the enzymes of the plant, putting it into microbes and, enabling thereby the microbes to produce this very precious molecule because it is, very, potent. So it has some sensitivity grade from 0.07 parts per billion.
Speaker 3:So if you think about what is needed for, for the whole raspberry aroma production worldwide, I was told by aroma companies that it will be maximal 1,000 euro a 1000 kilograms per year which we need to produce. And that is also, justifying the high price we are taking for it besides that fermentation process is very, a very costly one.
Speaker 2:And this is a very good example that this new technology can replace, in this case, the, raspberry production on the field depending on the weather, depending on water, on soil, so putting pressure to our precious land. And, in this way, with microbes, you can produce it wherever you want. It is more costly, yes, but you need much less of it. In the end, it's so efficient, that that is a sustainability criteria.
Speaker 3:Yeah. For example, land use change you will safe with it is, by effect of 200,000. So if you want to produce 1 gram of this raspberry aroma by extraction from raspberries, you would need 111 tons of raspberries to produce this one gram. And therefore, you would have to, cultivate 20 hectares of, raspberry plantation.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, during the preparation of this conversation, we talked about the challenges for the transition that we are talking, about, in this episode. Can you help the listener to understand the challenges that we need for the transition?
Speaker 2:Yeah. We have a twofold, challenge here. On the one side, we have a very powerful production system that works very well and efficiently, and we have to change it. So you can imagine all changes are difficult to to start and to convince the people to work together. On the other side, we have the consumers with their long lasting eating habits.
Speaker 2:So we are used to eat things that we trust and that we are connected to. That has a good reason because our bodies want to have safe food, so it is somehow in us to not change too much. So we want to stay with our eating habits. Both sides have to change. We need to change the production and the demand.
Speaker 2:And, this is where we are researching, investigating what options do we have to accelerate this process, to make it faster, Because the last 15 years, we already know that we want to change the system, but it's very slow. And that has to do with the many stakeholders in the system who are maybe not moving or not yet framing it in a good way. What we think is the challenge is to make it, collaborative work with both sides, production and demand, and to match the production with the needs and the wishes and expectations of the consumer. So we want to work together with many stakeholders in this system to co design this process in a way that it's accepted and that consumers want it. What we think is that we need a good story for new food.
Speaker 2:We need to tell a good story which is based on the old story and not completely new. Yeah. That is a big challenge for us, and we are working on this very hard.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So this is the part what your research is about?
Speaker 2:Exactly. This is what we do with our research, and this is why we collaborate with different parties from consumer science, from technology, policy makers, the media. So we have a lot of stakeholders here, and we we are very close to the consumer to know what drives sustainable food decisions. That is what we investigate with the consumer. This is what the Good Food Project is about and, what we are going to investigate the next 4 years.
Speaker 1:One of the stakeholders is, FritoWelt, and that's why Peter is here. Peter, can you explain the role of FritoWelt?
Speaker 3:Yes. Vita Welt, I founded in 1998 and with an notion or with an intention to increase, improve sustainability in, production processes. So we specialized in in two directions. 1 is plant breeding where we developed processes for plant breeding to accelerate plant breeding without having genetic engineering plants at the end. So we developed double haploid production, protoplast fusion, and tissue culture technologies, and especially the protoplast fusion, we were pretty successful.
Speaker 3:We had a lot of contracts with breeding companies, but also developed a breeding line of poplar trees for short rotation croppers for the production of bioenergy and biomass.
Speaker 2:Peter, I I would like to add something to, what you said. You are also in this group because the consumer does not know what genome editing is, and there is not yet transparency in these new processes and technologies. For the consumer, it is there is, in the end, something new which he's not familiar with and he feels not taken into consideration, taken alone. So the prod project is also about how can we make a story from it, how can we take the consumer early into the boat? All of us.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Genome editing is a special case, because, yeah, the consumer is is not familiar with with how plants are bred, how plants are cultivated. They have some romantic, ideas about how our food is, is produced at at least in Germany. I don't know exactly how it is here in the Netherlands, but, we have in in Germany, we have a very special vision of of, of production of food, which is more or less, organic biological agriculture, with a lot of space for, for everything, but that is not sustainable for sure, not sustainable.
Speaker 3:And it's not enough to produce food for, for the whole world. And, genome editing is, is a tool which is more precise, than those which we use in in the last 100 years for improving plants by chemical or, radiation mutation technologies.
Speaker 1:Okay. Thank you very much. Is there, something that I did not ask, or is there something that you would like to add, Sonja?
Speaker 2:I would like to, mention one of our consortium partners, which is a 3 d footprinting. And, this technology, I guess some of you have, tried it already because you can use it to print, for example, meat replacements, with plant ingredients, but also and now comes a very new idea. You could also print something with insect ingredients. So then you have a very new category of food. It's printed.
Speaker 2:It's the shape you wanted. It's maybe in the middle, smooth, and outside, it's cross. It might be a very new, experience, and, yeah, that is a little bit where we are also heading to.
Speaker 1:Peter, is there something that you would like to add?
Speaker 3:To wrap it up, to have a short, end of this conversation, I think that all of the technology which we mentioned today, are necessary to improve the sustainability of our food production. But one thing I I would like to ask you is to be more open to new technologies, especially, for plant production, for example, because I think that, all of technology provides some special solutions, but at the end of the day, the most sustainable will be a production in plants which are improved by breeding, by genome editing, and, the cultivation by precision farming.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Peter. Sonja, can you tell us where the listener can find more information about, the project?
Speaker 2:Yes. Sure. There is a website, the Fonte's website, where you can read back all the info of the project, and that is shown in the show notes. And also on LinkedIn, you can find all of us.
Speaker 1:Okay. Then I would like to thank you both for this conversation. Sonia, thank you very much.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Roeland.
Speaker 1:And Peter, thank you for coming, from Germany to the Netherlands.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Thank you very much. It's my pleasure.
Speaker 1:And I would like to thank the listener for staying all this time with us, and do not forget to subscribe because there will be a new episodes real soon. See you then.