NOVEL FOOD
ONE-PAGERS
We can help you identify the critical aspects of your novel food production process.
By offering valuable analytical insights we deliver a partnership that helps drive your innovation.
Below you can find a few examples of different compounds we can monitor.
RAW MATERIALS
ELEVATE YOUR PRECISION FERMENTATION PROCESS
WITH UNRIVALLED RAW MATERIAL SCREENING

- Background: As precision fermentation and cultivated meat become a key technology for obtaining a sustainable food chain, raw materials play a critical role in acquiring adequate product yield and quality.
Problem: Variations in raw material batches, such as peptones, can lead to significant differences in product yield, and identifying the molecular causes of these discrepancies is challenging.
Approach: A non-targeted LC-MS screening process was developed to analyze and compare different peptone batches, using principal component analysis (PCA) and feature extraction to identify molecular differences that affect productivity.
Outcome: Our screening revealed that specific plant metabolites in low-yield peptone batches were linked to reduced productivity, with further confirmation obtained by spiking plant metabolites into high-yield batches, demonstrating their negative impact on fermentation efficiency.
POLOXAMER
QUANTIFICATION OF POLOXAMER
IN CULTIVATED MEAT SAMPLES

- Background: As cultivated meat production grows to meet global food demands, surfactants like poloxamer are used in cell culture to optimize cell growth. However, these additives must be carefully monitored and removed from the final product.
Problem: Poloxamer’s complex chemical structure and micelle-forming properties make it challenging to detect and quantify at trace levels, requiring advanced analytical methods for monitoring during production.
Approach: We’ve developed a liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) method, enhanced with sample clean-up techniques, to accurately detect and quantify poloxamer residues in complex cultivated meat samples.
Outcome: Our optimized LC-MS/MS method can successfully track poloxamer clearance during various stages of production, achieving sensitivity down to 0.5 ppm, and enabling effective monitoring and removal of the surfactant from final products.
PROTEINS
STRUCTURAL CHARACTERIZATION
OF RECOMBINANT PROTEINS

- Background: With the growing demand for animal-free alternatives, precision fermentation is being explored to produce recombinant animal proteins in host cells like bacteria, yeast and fungi as a sustainable solution.
Problem: Recombinant proteins produced via precision fermentation require thorough structural characterization to ensure their identity, integrity and quality, including the detection of post-translational modifications like phosphorylation.
Approach: Liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (LC-MS) was employed to analyze recombinant caseins, focusing on molecular weight, amino acid sequence, phosphorylation, patterns and peptide mapping to identify and locate phosphorylation sites.
Outcome: Our LC-MS method can successfully identify two phospho-isoforms of αS1 casein with different phosphorylation degrees and revealed the location of phosphorylation sites, providing critical structural information for comparing recombinant proteins to their animal-derived counterparts and optimizing production processes.
AROMA
AROMA PROFILING ON NOVEL FOOD PRODUCTS

- Background: Within the novel food initiative aroma plays a crucial role in final product quality and ultimate market acceptance.
Problem: Aroma profiling is challenging due to the complexity and variability of aroma compounds, including their low concentrations, volatility and instability, making it difficult to analyze them accurately and reliably.
Approach: The use of gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) combined with headspace analysis for sustainable extraction and principal component analysis (PCA) for statistical data analysis was employed to compare the aroma profiles of conventional and plant-based meat products.
Outcome: Our analysis identified over 100 aroma compounds, revealing distinct differences between conventional and plant-based burgers, with specific compounds linked to each product type, highlighting the effectiveness of GC-MS in optimizing food product development.