SATW supports six food projects

As part of the "Food 4.0" funding program, the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences (SATW) is supporting six projects with CHF 25,000 each. Funding is primarily being provided for projects that are looking for ways to increasingly replace animal proteins with plant proteins, as SATW writes in a statement. Fourteen projects were submitted, and a team of experts made the selection.

The aim of the "Food 4.0" program is to strengthen the Swiss food system and equip it for the future by promoting transdisciplinary and innovative projects. The lively scene of start-ups and spin-offs and competitive research would contribute to the fact that Switzerland is on its way to becoming a leading foodtech location.

The projects supported:

Dairy utilization

The BFH Bioconversion and Protective Cultures team led by Daniel Heine and Lisamaria Bircher is working with Agroscope Liebefeld and Doris Erne's start-up company Lokal-Genuss AG to investigate how whey from Swiss cheese production can be fully utilized for human nutrition thanks to lactic acid fermentation.

Peas without bean flavor

The team led by Christoph Denkel (Food Process Technology) and Christian Trindler (Flavor Analytics) is investigating how the concentration of unwanted flavor molecules can be controlled during protein extraction from peas without compromising the protein properties.

Structures for the steak from the laboratory

Simona Fehlmann and her team at ETH Zurich want to further develop a scaffold, an edible foam, on which the cells of cultured meat can grow into a thick piece of meat. The scaffold is based on an open pore system so that nutrients and muscle cells can be distributed homogeneously as the muscle tissue grows.

Shrimp without hook

The start-up Catchfree, led by Lukas Böcker and Severin Eder at ETH Zurich, is developing a process to mold a mass of vegetable protein into shrimp. It should also be possible to produce other vegetable seafood in this way one day.

Vegan glaze sticks

Stephan Bolliger and his team from ice cream manufacturer Cuckoo Produktions AG want to produce vegan ice cream that not only tastes the same as ice cream made from animal proteins, but that can also be shaped as desired - for example into coated ice cream sticks or into ice cream cakes.

Reduce mold in grain

Susanne Miescher Schwenninger and her team at ZHAW are working on microorganisms that naturally reduce a cereal-typical mycotoxin. They would like to explore how exactly this happens, thereby estimating the potential for application to cereals.