Dive briefs:
- Artificial intelligence-powered food tech company Shiru has launched its first ingredient, OleoPro. Oleopro is a vegetable fat that combines vegetable proteins and unsaturated oils.
- OleoPro can hold its shape at room temperature, brown when cooked, impart a juicy mouthfeel to plant-based applications, and reduce saturated fat by 90% in plant-based products.
- Plant-based meat products have traditionally relied on unhealthy fats that don’t always perform as well as their animal counterparts, such as coconut oil. is one of the companies in
Dive Insight:
OleoPro can improve the consumer’s experience of eating plant-based meat products and their nutritional profile.
“Consumers don’t have to compromise on taste or texture to choose sustainable, nutritious foods. And new ingredients are essential to unlocking the next generation of plant-based foods.” we know that.” jasmine Hume, founder and CEO of Shiru, said in a statement. “Today, the oils commonly used in plant-based meats like palm and coconut are disastrous for the environment and not good from a health standpoint.
OleoPro was created using Shiru’s Flourish platform. A range of scientific information to generate plant protein insights. Shiru uses existing databases and bioinformatics to analyze and apply which proteins provide function in different components Identify proteins in plants using machine learning and AI.
Shiru aims both to replicate animal-based ingredients and to create ingredients like OleoPro that improve on existing options.Current options such as coconut oil and palm oil are high in saturated fat. , is not always beneficial for the environment. The behavior and taste of these oils that leach out of the product to give it flavor can also negatively affect the dining experience.
Several companies have used food technology to improve plant-based fats, and Shiru’s OleoPro was one of the first to hit the market.
Cubic Foods We have worked to create both optimized plant-based and cultured fats.
Cubiq recently entered into a co-development and go-to-market partnership with Cargill. The US agribusiness giant is now making vegetable fats available in Cubiq’s Go!Drop line.start up Still in the R&D stage, Yali Bio uses precision fermentation to produce fats that: Naturally occurring in animal meat and dairy products.
This is Shiru’s first official market entry, but the company is working on several other ingredients.
CP Kelco partnered with Shiru last year to develop and scale up new ingredients that are more sustainable or natural solutions to common ingredients such as the emulsifier methylcellulose. Shiru has also worked with bakery ingredient maker He Puratos to evaluate and scale up egg protein alternatives. baked goods.
Now is a good time to launch fat ingredients that can improve plant-based meats. Analysts say one reason is that consumers are not satisfied with the products currently on the market. Being able to create products with better eating and mouthfeel experiences and improved health profiles can only help.
