One of the main challenges we face as a society is the population increase expected by 2050 of more than 10,000 million people and how to feed this entire population in a healthy and, at the same time, sustainable way. The population increase predicts a massive demand for food and, consequently, for animal protein, a worrying fact in a climate emergency context due to its high environmental impact.
In recent years, the interest, innovation, and investment in meat analogues have increased significantly. Technologies are delivering, or are expected to deliver, products that have the potential to reduce traditional meat consumption without a drastic shift in eating behaviors.
Zyrcular Foods is a company focused on the development, production, and distribution of alternative protein foods. Sustainability, innovation, and research are the main pillars of the company. For this reason, research into new vegetable raw materials and the industrial processes for obtaining the new products can be interesting lines of research to obtain these new foods.
The project will be performed by the Zyrcular Foods group in collaboration with the UVIC-UCC. This consists of an industrial PhD carried out by Gil Vila Clarà and supervised by Anna Vila-Martí and Míriam Torres-Moreno. The project aims to study the influence of different vegetable raw materials and their processing through extrusion on the physical, chemical, and sensorial characteristics applicable to the design and optimization of new alternative vegetable products.
The specific objectives proposed are:
- Identify emerging vegetable raw materials suitable from a nutritional and sustainability point of view for the development of meat alternative vegetable products.
- Study the technological behavior during the extrusion process of vegetable raw materials.
- Analyze the impact of raw materials and processing on the physical, chemical, and sensory characteristics of vegetable products.
- Optimize alternative vegetable products based on consumer acceptability.