Can we ferment our solution to extra meals safety?

Once you consider fermented meals, you most likely conjure up photos of sauerkraut, wine and cheese.

However this centuries-old meals processing expertise holds the potential to assist lower meals insecurity, and Saskatchewan is poised to be a world chief in it. 

“In Canada, we’re fortunate to have a lot meals,” says Mehmet Tulbek, the president of the Saskatchewan Meals Trade Growth Centre in Saskatoon, which works with firms to create new merchandise, together with utilizing fermentation. “That is why we have to lead this motion. We will present a extra sustainable and safe meals provide chain. That is actually the important thing about this expertise.”

Fermentation expertise at a business scale gives the chance to develop extra nutritious meals merchandise utilizing crops and by-products that exist in abundance in Canada, and even to rework what would in any other case be waste from meals processing, Tulbek says.

WATCH | CBC’s Natascia Lypny checked out a few of the Sask. firms experimenting with fermentation:

Why fermentation?

Fermentation was traditionally used to increase the shelf lifetime of meals. It principally refers to changing microorganisms into meals, elements or merchandise with particular features. 

On a business scale, the fermentation course of works a lot the identical, though it’s extra managed when it comes to the cultures concerned. Firms have been significantly targeted on utilizing fermentation to change the dietary content material of meals, and make them extra palatable.

In line with the Good Meals Institute, the meals processing trade started utilizing fermentation extensively within the Nineteen Eighties. In recent times, curiosity on this expertise is spiking to the purpose the place it is thought of a pillar of the “new protein revolution,” which refers back to the rising world demand for high-quality various and plant-based proteins which are developed in sustainable, moral and environmentally pleasant methods.

Modern meals processing options, corresponding to fermentation, will likely be important to addressing the world’s rising meals insecurity points, says Steven Webb, the chief director of the World Institute for Meals Safety. In its Saskatoon-based bioengineering facility, it develops substances corresponding to proteins that can be utilized in meals and product growth at processing centres just like the Meals Centre. 

Webb says, globally, meals insecurity is worse now than it was three years in the past as a result of a wide range of components, together with the COVID-19 pandemic, the warfare in Ukraine, and a quickly rising world inhabitants. In November, the world hit eight billion folks, and the United Nations estimates the worldwide inhabitants will hit 9.7 billion by 2050.

“We want to have the ability to feed the world nutritiously and sustainably with much less land, much less water and fewer sources,” says Webb.

Why Saskatchewan?

Dwelling to roughly 43 per cent of Canada’s arable land and a burgeoning value-added sector, Saskatchewan is especially effectively positioned to try this.

“In Saskatchewan we’ve got too many sources,” says Rajneesh Tyagi, a Saskatoon-based entrepreneur and fermentation professional. “Our problem is principally so as to add worth to our native crops.”

For instance, a number of native firms at the moment are producing protein focus from pulses (crops like peas and lentils), which leaves a starch by-product. Fermentation gives the chance to make use of these by-products by remodeling them into nutritious merchandise, like ready-to-eat, plant-based “meat” that appears, tastes and looks like the true factor, and can be utilized in a wide range of methods. 

Fermentation also can assist create protein concentrates and isolates from the cereals and pulses grown in Saskatchewan which are extra simply digestible for people. So, your physique finally ends up getting extra out of the identical quantity of meals, says Tyagi.

One in every of Tyagi’s firms, Proveta Diet, has already seen success utilizing fermentation to create cost-effective animal feed that does simply that.

One other Canadian firm, Algarithm, has used fermentation to create a plant-based, environmentally pleasant Omega-3 oil. Now, it is working with the Meals Centre to check new methods of utilizing the oil in meals merchandise.

‘The subsequent bio revolution’ 

In 2020, McKinsey and Firm, a administration consulting agency, estimated the bio-manufacturing trade may develop to $4 trillion a 12 months globally over the subsequent 10 to twenty years.

“It is regarded as the subsequent bio revolution or subsequent industrial revolution,” says Webb.

To get there, Canadian companies want extra help to scale up their manufacturing to get gadgets on cabinets at reasonably priced costs.

“There are such a lot of organizations in Canada working on this area and after we mix all these efforts, nonetheless there may be not sufficient capability,” says Tulbek. “So it is a actually rising space. Over the subsequent 30 years we’ll be needing fairly a little bit of fermentation and the bioengineering analysis, incubation and commercialization for the startups to develop after which to commercialize that.”

The Saskatchewan Meals Trade Growth Centre is constructing an eight-thousand-square-foot facility in Saskatoon to help simply that.

“It is a spot we will pilot and trial various things at a large enough scale that we will see if it’ll work after we go as much as 100,000 litres or not,” says Algarithm president Ben Kelly. 

Final 12 months, the Meals Centre additionally introduced together with companions that it was placing $1.3 million into increasing its fermentation and coaching program, with a give attention to plant-based merchandise.

One other problem will likely be addressing the regulatory facet of issues, says Webb. 

“One of many issues that is been an actual problem for innovation within the ag and meals area is the flexibility to take actually attention-grabbing technical improvements and make them market impacting,” he says.

Any new meals processing expertise in Canada is topic to strict federal rules, which some trade members consider could be prohibitive to innovation. 

Tyagi additionally sees a necessity for funding — financial and in any other case.

“The trade may be very new, so participation of all stakeholders is required for the speedy progress and growth of the sector,” he says.

Regardless of these challenges, there’s a robust sense of optimism inside the sector. 

“We should be extra proactive in constructing resiliency into our methods right here at residence and internationally to make sure meals safety,” Webb says. “I consider that innovation is the answer. I consider, due to our efficiency and confirmed observe file when it comes to new instruments, new applied sciences, new improvements, we will tackle these challenges.”