Sustainable food

Mushroom magic may be the future of plant-based meat

Developing delicious plant-based meat alternatives can be a struggle, but some companies have cracked the code. Mushroom fermentation is the magic ingredient adding flavour and texture to a new sustainable product from the startup Matr, which DTU collaborates with.

Mushroom mycelium has the ability to bind other ingredients together. Photo: Colourbox

Thursday 26 September 2024

Sole Bugge Møller

Even though supermarket shelves are full of products that attempt – with varying degrees of success – to emulate minced meat without a single pig or cow being involved, consumers haven't entirely embraced it.

In fact, sales of processed plant-based products fell in 2022 after growing 52% overall in the previous three years, according to the Danish knowledge centre Plantebaseret Videnscenter.

That's why we need a new generation of plant-based meat that is not ultra-processed and that tastes better. At least that's what the people behind Matr Foods believe, and the solution is completely natural – mushrooms, also known as fungi.

Matr is collaborating with DTU and has several DTU staff among its co-founders, namely Professor Morten Sommer and co-principal investigator Leoni Johanna Jahn, both from DTU Biosustain, and affiliated professor Claus Meyer.

“We're not trying to imitate meat, because when you compare plant-based alternatives to the real thing, they never taste exactly the same. Instead, we're trying to make a product that tastes delicious in its own way,” says Leoni Johanna Jahn, who is also Science Advisor at Matr.

Matr har udviklet en række fungibaserede produkter, der allerede kan købes i en række restauranter. Foto: Matr Foods

Mushroom magic

Matr sells a fungi steak and minced fungi that have a carbon footprint that has less than 10 per cent the carbon footprint of beef. The products are made from natural ingredients such as split peas, potato, beetroot, oats and lupin with natural fungal spores added. And it's the fungal spores that initiate the fermentation process that creates the magic. During fermentation, the spores create a network of small roots called hyphae into the other ingredients, which under a microscope resemble meat fibres to some extent. These networks of hyphae are also called mycelia.

“Many plant-based meat alternatives lack structure, so you have to use a number of additives. But filamentous fungi (the group of fungi that form hyphae) naturally create that texture and bind everything together,” says Leoni Johanna Jahn.

The other benefit of mushroom fermentation is that it develops flavour. The mushrooms break down the nutrients into starch and amino acids, which adds sweetness and umami.

“So the mushrooms develop a completely new flavour without us having to add anything,” she says.

DTU assists in scaling up

You can already sink your teeth into Matr's products in a number of restaurants such as Gasoline Grill, Sticks ‘n’ Sushi and Meyer's Food Truck, and you can buy their fungi steak and minced fungi on the online grocery store Nemlig.com. But the goal is to get production up to a higher volume, and researchers from DTU are helping with the scale-up by creating structure in the fungi products and microbiological analyses of the fermentation. In addition, DTU researchers are also analyzing which components of the fungal fermentation affect the taste.

“The goal is to reach as many people as possible with sustainable, healthy and delicious food,” says Leoni Johanna Jahn.

Topic

Sustainable food

26 % of the world's total CO2 emissions come from food production. Livestock in particular account for a large share.

To reduce the climate impact of food production, we need a green transition. This can be achieved through the use of technology, digitalization and the development of new foods.

Contact

Leonie Johanna Jahn Co-Principal Investigator of the Bacterial Synthetic Biology Section Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability lejj@biosustain.dtu.dk