Designing a good emulsifier for non meat products

Looking for lucrative answers

Just what is it about egg white that makes it such a good emulsifier for non meat products?

What other ingredients could prove as effective in the binding process, empowering manufacturers to remove all animal products from what ends up on our shelves?

And could swapping the albumen out for an alternative help make mycoprotein more nutritious, too?

As estimates value the UK’s meat-free food sales at more than £1bn and analysis claims the NHS could save £6.7bn a year if everyone in England went plant-based, the (vegan) stakes involved in answering these questions could not be higher.

The hard science of texture

Research in this field, however, is not exactly straightforward.

“For starters,” Professor Murray said, “it’s often difficult to even understand the problems you need to address until you’ve progressed quite far.

“From my years of working with businesses, I’ve found that even with as much transparency as is commercially possible, our partners can mention things in conversation many months into a project that they have no idea could be important scientifically. 

“And likewise, until we hear about such things, we don’t know they’re there – it’s why you need a really strong partnership and very regular communication from day one to stand a chance of making real breakthroughs.”

This partnership came about via the Centre for Doctoral Training in Molecules to Product, which brings together businesses and early career researchers to solve molecular challenges with real-world applications.

Brent’s colleague, PhD student Mary Okeudo-Cogan, was one of a cohort of scientists in the programme invited to choose from a range of available projects put forward by a number of participating firms all of which were somewhat generic in nature.

“That was important; it meant the work wouldn’t necessarily be tied to just one company or one type of product, Brent explained.

“Because what we are basically dealing with is how things bind to fibrous material to change its overall texture, that core principle is the same whether we’re looking at food, pharma, personal care products or other areas.”

Then there’s the amount of detail and precision involved, with studies at the individual protein level, working with microscopes to examine things as small as just a few nanometres (one billionth of a metre).

Plus, the food industry’s competitive nature necessitates a level of secrecy around manufacturing techniques and consumer research insights, meaning there can be an essential disparity between Mary’s lab-based work and the many factors industry must consider to get new products to market.

“Essentially, we’re feeding whatever we’re learning to their team and they are processing behind another door,” Professor Murray said. “We’re providing an input that industry can then translate into the world of products and business as they need.” 

Trial, error and emulation

But above all, Brent believes the biggest hurdles are scientific.

“The way it works with this sort of research, you are constantly adding, replacing and tweaking the nutrients you add to the mycoprotein.” Brent noted.

“We’re also trying to compete with nature, which has evolved perfect colloidal systems like milk, so replacing animal-based ingredients with plant-sourced alternatives is no mean feat."

“It’s not just a question of understanding the stability of the traditional ingredients so we can mimic them; we also have to learn about how colloidal structure affects digestion and our long-term health.”

From research to shopping baskets

Brent, whose grandfather was a farmer, decided to work with food colloids – the term for the physical structure of food from collections of particles such as air bubbles or oil droplets – in the final year of his undergraduate Food Science degree at Leeds.

That led to him completing a PhD, after which he temporarily left the field of food to become a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Melbourne, studying colloid science for use in sensors and mineral processing instead.

But remarkably, he may have become first became interested in the topic at the age of only five.

“My father was a photographer back then,” Professor Murray recalled. “Dad told the young me all about the principles of photographic emulsions stabilised by the protein gelatine – so perhaps something stuck.”

Today, Brent’s is a fascination that puts him right at the front line of a drive to make the UK the leader of the emerging proteins market – an industry that could, according to some estimations, create as many as 25,000 jobs in the country by 2035 (PDF).

Growing proteins and productivity

Globally, there’s even more potential.

In Asia, alternative proteins are on the rise because they enable far more efficient methods of food production, providing a resource-saving route when compared to the nine calories of crops that a chicken consumes to produce just one calorie of meat.

Forecasts by KPMG, meanwhile, predict growth rates of over 20 per cent for the alternative proteins sector, indicating the continued level of investment in solutions like those being led by Professor Murray.

As for the research with industry partners?

Work is still underway, but experiments to date have recommended that mycoprotein manufacturers should balance pH and calcium in order to enable iron supplementation with minimal textural effects.

“We’re passing on the findings to our partners for them to interpret and do all the things they may need to do as a business, like consumer testing and cost analyses,” Brent said.

“That’s the beauty of working here at Leeds; we aren’t just dealing in the theoretical, we’re helping to overcome the challenges we all need to tackle to create a better real-world future.”