How do you get blended foods right? A summary
- Blended foods combine animal and plant proteins for sustainability gains
- Consumers want familiar taste and texture with added health benefits
- Off-flavours and texture changes are key formulation challenges to solve
- Microbial risks differ and require tailored heat and safety processes
- Ingredient selection and process optimisation must work hand in hand
Hybrid, blended, mixed or enriched. Whatever you call them, foods that incorporate animal-free components into traditional animal-based products look set to have a major impact on the food market. But you can’t just add a new ingredient into an established process and hope to get a saleable product. So how do you create blended food products that will find success in the marketplace?
What’s driving the blend?
The growth in plant-based alternatives to animal-based foods has stalled recently. These products target people who have been regular meat eaters but now want to cut down – whether for health, environmental or animal welfare reasons. They want to make the change, but still want taste, texture and “cookability” that they can recognise from their animal-based favourites. And they aren’t yet finding that in 100% plant-based products.
At the same time, in response to cost concerns and regulation, many food retailers and manufacturers have set themselves ambitious targets to sell more alternative proteins and less animal proteins. These two factors are driving growing interest across the food industry, in foods that use alternative food components within traditional products - blended or enriched foods. As a result, supermarket chains Albert Heijn and Lidl both recently launched blended meat and dairy products.
Blended foods give flexitarian consumers the health and sustainability benefits they are looking for, without compromising on taste and texture. But only if you get them right.
Why is blending so challenging?
Creating a successful blended product isn’t straightforward. Plant proteins, for instance, often bring off-flavours that could be noticeable in a blended product. Moreover, adding any additional ingredient to a well-known foodstuff is likely to affect the matrix and microstructures of that food, potentially changing the mouthfeel. Sometimes the effect only becomes apparent after further processing - for example, adding some plant-based proteins to cow’s milk can prevent the milk coagulating when you add rennet, so you end up with sloppy cheese.
Plant-based products also have a very different set of likely microbial contaminants, with more heat-resistant and spore-forming microbes present. If you use the same process, with the same heat profile as your animal-based product, you could end up with a serious food safety issue. However, if you just increase the heat load in the process, you risk denaturing the animal proteins and ruining the taste and texture you’re trying to deliver.
If the levels of added components are low enough, these problems may not be apparent. But the higher the concentration of alternative components, the greater the risk of noticeable problems arising. And for blended products to have a real impact on sustainability, they will need to have a significant proportion of alternative components.
The art of the blend – is science
You can, of course, try to tackle these issues through trial and error. But that can take a lot of time, effort and resources. For faster results, you need to think about what happens in blended products on a molecular level. And over the last couple of years, the food industry has discovered a lot more about how different ingredients interact at the molecular level, and the impact this has on the taste, texture and stability of the final product.
In the sloppy cheese example above, we now know that some plant proteins interact with casein micelles in milk more strongly than others. This stops the casein forming the complex structures that give a cheese its specific texture.
Similarly, through the work of companies like NIZO, we now have a much better idea of which volatile compounds cause the off-flavours associated with certain plant proteins. Crucially, we also understand how many of these compounds interact with different product matrices, and so are better able to predict whether the off-flavour will be perceived in a given product.
Applying the knowledge
Once you understand how and why things go wrong, you also have the direction on how to put them right. Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Every case has its own solution – but that solution will usually be based on some common tactics.
First is the careful selection of ingredients based on the knowledge accrued in the industry in recent years. That could mean choosing plant proteins whose off-flavours will be least noticeable or more easily masked in your chosen product format (drink, yoghurt, cheese, meat etc). Or alternative ingredients that interact minimally with the microstructures in your product matrix.
Second is to optimise your production process to suit the combination of ingredients. For example, adjusting the parameters of heat treatment stages to ensure food safety without denaturing proteins. Meanwhile, processes such as drying and fermentation can reduce off-flavours further. However, any fermentation stages will need to be carefully reviewed, as the presence of alternative ingredients could impact the fermentation process, potentially changing the flavour profile and the growth of unexpected bacteria.
These two steps need to be considered holistically. You want to be sure that the desired properties of the ingredients you chose will survive under the heat, pH shifts and mechanical of your optimised process. And bear in mind that the larger the ratio of alternative ingredients, the larger the changes needed to properly optimise the production process.
The best of both worlds
Creating a blended product that works perfectly is a challenge. But the work done in the industry in the last couple of years means it is a challenge you can tackle with confidence.
And, if you get it right, you’ll be offering consumers a sustainable option that doesn’t compromise on taste or texture - a product that really is the best of both worlds.
