Ingredient giants CP Kelco and Chr. Hansen are proud to offer customers a collaboration combining their world-leading expertise and solutions to take consumer-friendly, shelf-stable, plant-based yogurt alternatives (‘vegurts’) to the next level.
Consumer demand for healthy and more sustainable food choices has driven an explosion in launches of plant-based alternatives to traditional dairy products. Within these categories, manufacturers and retailers have recognised the advantages of shelf-stable products which can reduce food waste and increase geographical reach. For consumers, ambient-stable products offer convenience. However, to embrace regular consumption consumers are not ready to compromise on taste, nutrition, and the ‘naturalness’ of shelf-stable, plant-based products.
CP Kelco and Chr. Hansen have closely collaborated to demonstrate that production of nutritious and great-tasting, ambient, plant-based yogurt alternatives are possible for a variety of different plant bases. The result of this collaboration includes industrially validated prototypes of drinkable and spoonable vegurts with either oat, soy, pea, coconut or almond bases.
Said Christian Gilleladen, Principal Application Scientist, Chr. Hansen: “The technological challenge to produce both spoonable and drinkable ambient vegurts with great nutrition, taste and texture is significant. Selecting the right culture to provide fermentation performance, texture and flavour for each recipe, and having these complement the stabilisation and flavour systems is critical to making great products.
“By working together, we have been able to unlock the synergies between ingredients and process to produce a variety of desired thicknesses and mouthfeel.
Added Anne Sinha, Marketing Director, CP Kelco: “This collaboration represents a new way of helping our respective customers accelerate their product development and access technical application support globally. With access to teams who know each other and work together well, and who are closely connected to other global ingredient producers, customers can benefit from an integrated team of world-leading experts with insights across their entire development chain.”
To date, a range of vegurt prototypes are available to food producers for tasting, and they have received positive feedback from select customers. The prototype recipes can be tweaked to meet specific requirements for sugar, protein, fat, texture and flavour, thanks to the comprehensive expertise in fermentation, stabilisation, flavour, processing and packaging offered by the collaboration.
Concluded Tora Jorn, Sales Technical Service Manager, CP Kelco: “Formulating plant-based vegurts is not straight forward, and we want to help our customers to be best in class by offering our joint technical expertise. Together, we look forward to this opportunity of sharing our support and helping with the development of the flavours, textures and nutritional profiles our customers are targeting when they embark on the plant-based, shelf-stable vegurts journey.” For more visit stand 4.C180 at Food Ingredients Europe (FIE) in Paris, December 6-8 or cpkelco.com
