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A team of researchers at Tallinn University of Technology will over the next three years work to develop reformulated foods that could help to reduce rates of obesity and diabetes in the Estonian population.
The new project commenced in May (2024) and will run through February 2028, with a budget of more than €576,000 provided through the Estonian Research Council. It takes aim at a major health concern in the country: according to a 2022 study by the Estonian National Institute for Health Development (TAI), 31 percent of children in the first, fourth and seventh grades were overweight. Experts are particularly concerned about the rise in the proportion of obese children.
Rather than encouraging Estonians to stop eating sweet and salty foods, which has been the main preventative but unsuccessful method so far, the TalTech team will seek to develop alterantives to such highly consumed ultra-processed snacks. They are planning to use natural sweet-tasting peptides and oligosaccharides to replace sugar, as well as use flavor compounds that could make food taste saltier than it actually is. In this way, healthier foods could appear on the market that are as satisfying as the sweet and salty foods that are widely consumed.
Reformulating foods
According to Kristel Vene, principal investigator on the project, food reformulation has been encouraged by the European Union through several initiatives in recent years, but has not really caught on as it hasn’t been made compulsory. Companies that do work to reduce the amounts of salt, sugar, and saturated fats in their products also face losing business to competitors that don’t.
“It’s a contradiction, if one company reduces salt and the other does not, people will turn to saltier products,” says Vene, who is a senior lecturer at TalTech’s department of chemistry and biotechnology. “Or if there’s less sugar, it will be less tasty, and companies will lose their competitive edge.”
Vene adds that another very important aspect in food reformulation is that it has not been accomplished the right way. “So far we have looked at food as the sum of macromolecules and overlooked the importance of processing and texture,” she says. “Scientists have now understood that food is much more complex and affects the body not only by nutrients but also through our gut microbiome and just taking one more criticized compound out or replacing it with another, less problematic one, has not brought us closer to eating healthier,” she adds.
Vene’s solution is to find ways to reduce salt, sugar, and saturated fats in products without altering the products’ flavors. In part, the wheels have already been in motion at TalTech to do so for some time. Vene said she and fellow researchers have accrued over the past decade knowledge on how to lower sugar and fat without changing the flavor of a product. “There are specific compounds and flavor synergies that you can use,” says Vene. “And some tricks will work in one product but not in others. This is what we are going to find out now using defined model foods.”
Model foods
The basis of the project is that Vene’s team will work to create very basic and well-defined model foods, such as cookies, bread, ketchup, soft drinks, and gummy candies that have a minimum amount of ingredients. Then those model foods can be adjusted using individual flavor modulators, sweet tasting peptides and oligosaccharides to understand how each compound affects the flavor, texture as well as the shelf life.
TalTech’s researchers have access to modulators that are not yet used and allowed in the market as well as has methods to extract new undiscovered compounds from nature (preferably side streams from the Estonian food industry, like sour whey). Vene’s team will develop an overview of these modulators and assess which ones work best in which foods. And, yes, they will taste the products to assess how good they turn out.
Vene has employed some tricks already in a company she co-founded with Mariliis Mia Topp called Raw Edge. Founded in July 2021, Raw Edge has developed and launched a line of fermented carrot juice-based soft-drinks that are now available in Estonian supermarkets and restaurants.
While these drinks, which contain patented Lactoplantibacillus plantarum TENSIA created by scientists at the University of Tartu, might taste sweet, they actually contain less than 1 percent sugar, Vene points out. This is because the drink contains certain sweet-tasting compounds found in carrots as well as natural flavor modulators and enhancers. It’s a combination of smell and taste molecules that work synergistically.
For the new research project, Vene and her team will continue to explore the properties of carrots. She notes that in the production of carrot juice, about 70 percent of the carrot is discarded as pulp, and that most of the same natural sweet-tasting compounds that are present in the cell walls could be extracted from a food production “side stream,” the pulp and used as a sweetener in other products.
“We are trying to find natural compounds and modulators from side streams,” says Vene. “That way, we can use the side stream for something beneficial and natural.”
For example, sugar could be partly removed from biscuits and replaced with such a natural sweetener. Of course we cannot remove all the sugar as in some products they play not only flavor, but also textural role and replacing sugar with filler ingredients such as modified starches and gums is definitely not the goal of this project.
Collaboration with innovative companies in Estonia
With that knowledge in hand, they will not only publish their findings, but they will work with companies like Raw Edge and ÄIO Tech and other innovative companies in Estonia. “This project was meant to be much applied,” says Vene. “We intend to apply this knowledge also on real products.” We also want to work closely together with other research projects, for example precision fermentation teams, who could be using biotechnology to produce the same sweet tasting peptides we have extracted in much larger scale or even modify them so they are more resistant to pH or temperature.
At Raw Edge, Vene could also apply knowledge from the project to create new products. She said that the company is currently at work on developing functional gummy candies made from fermented carrot juice that could become a healthy, low calorie and low sugar snack.
In general, she said, Estonians’ gut health suffers from overconsumption of ultraprocessed foods, such as soft drinks, instant noodles, chips, etc. that are high in calories and of low nutritional value, not to mention loaded with preservatives and filler ingredients. These foods have a negative impact on gut health, as only a few bacteria can survive on them, and typically not beneficial strains. “We need live foods and a variety of them in our diet,” Vene stresses. “We need to consume one fermented product per day, whether it’s yogurt, sauerkraut, or a carrot juice drink,” she says.
A very important task
Vene has been involved in food technology since she was an undergraduate at TalTech. She also worked on food flavor quality at the Center of Food and Fermentation Technologies (TFTAK) in Tallinn. She credits her interest in flavor and food to a personal love of chemistry. Also, her father was once a director of a candy factory, which might have also inspired her. Now, she is turning her attention to producing new solutions that could change the local food industry.
“Estonia has entrusted me with a very important task, one I take very seriously,” she says of the new project. “I feel I can make an impact on consumer understanding, behavior, and health.”
This article is written by Justin Petrone. This article was funded by the European Regional Development Fund through Estonian Research Council.
If you thought food was just about taste, think again – science is the secret ingredient! Dig into our next article “Tallinn University’s New Science Kitchen Aims to Serve Up the Tastiest Education in Town” and see how the lab meets the kitchen for some truly delicious discoveries!
