Providing healthy food for our future generations in a planet-friendly way. The acib – austrian centre of industrial biotechnology spin-off Yflavour’s mission is to make alternative protein products delicious and healthy with authentic, natural and vegan flavours.
A huge challenge for future generations is to provide healthy food in a sustainable way. The planet’s resource limits have already been reached. Livestock farming not only takes up 70-80% of all farmable land but also causes 15% of GHG emissions worldwide[1,2]. A solution for this problem is to substitute a part of conventional meat with alternative, plant-based protein sources. Unfortunately, PBM (plant-based meat) producers report stagnating sales due to a low consumer acceptance for alternative products[3,4]. A disappointing taste was revealed as the main reason in a consumer survey from the Good Food Institute.[5] Yflavour offers a unique solution for alternative meat producers to boost their products acceptance among customers with our natural and healthy flavours for a delicious taste.
Towards a better taste experience in alternatives.
But how? We produce natural and authentic meat flavours with various aroma profiles to serve different tastes. Through fine-tuning of our bioprocess, we achieve a tailored precursor profile and a higher precursor content. Thereby, we ensure a specific and stable flavour development. We were able to bring proof of a significant improvement of the meat taste in a commercially available plant-based burger by testing it with a professional sensory panel. The results with our Yflavour mixed into the burger are presented in the graph with the green line. YFlavour enhances the taste of the burger in all meat relevant aroma attributes. Our goal is to transform plant-based meats from an alternative into an everyday choice for meat lovers.
We combine innovation with ancient techniques.
Our motivation is to support our community in means of maintaining a good and healthy quality of life. Therefore, we focus on an environmentally friendly process design with mild conditions, avoiding organic solvent use. We upcycle sidestreams from industrial food producers as feedstock for a cheaper and more sustainable fermentation. To ensure higher yields in less processing time, we use a laboratory evolution approach to engineer our yeast strains, still considered a non-GMO (non- genetically modified organism). The fermentation fine-tuning combined with our innovative feeding strategy is a unique and sustainable process, which enables us to unlock the potential of fermented flavours. Thereby we can produce distinct, different tastes, which are healthy and tailored to our customer needs.
Yflavour’s journey
Yflavour’s journey started together with acib in 2023, where we reached the proof of concept (PoC) at the institute of molecular biotechnology in close collaboration with Prof. Harald Pichler and Dr. Aleksandra Fuchs. Both are supporting Yflavour as part of the team with their expertise and enthusiasm and we founded the company Yflavour FlexCo in January 2025. Now we are upscaling our process to produce sufficient amounts of flavour to test our products with interested alternative protein companies.
Funding and supporting partners
Picture: acib & Pixabay