Replicating eggs with a plant-based alternative
Innovating to improve on nature and benefit people, poultry and planet
Eggs are a natural wonder, flexible enough to be cooked in a wide variety of ways and essential ingredients in many of the foods people know and love the world over.
So how can we replicate them with a plant-based alternative that's good for people and the planet? Dr Alan Javier Hernandez Alvarez is leading a team of researchers to find out.
Growing up in Mexico, Alan was immersed in a culture in which protein is ever present.
From the ubiquitous bean to chicken and other meats rich in the essential nutrient, Alan was aware from a young age that his country’s proud culinary heritage shaped his diet more than his peers might realise.
But it was only while travelling across the world during his career as an expert on the complex relationships between food and health that he fully appreciated the full picture of protein.
Why do we eat what we eat? What does that mean of our physical wellbeing? How is our choice of fillings or ingredients changing – and how can we encourage people to consume healthier sources of protein as part of a more balanced diet?
There are more than 300,000 edible plants in the world, but just 12 crops and five animal sources provide around three-quarters of all the calories humans consume?
In his role as Lecturer in Nutrition and Global Health in the School of Food Science and Nutrition, Dr Alvarez is one of a growing number of experienced researchers at the University of Leeds partnering with businesses to answer these questions.
And among the many projects enjoying his involvement, there’s one particular mission that has occupied Alan’s time of late: the challenge of making convincing, appealing and comparable plant-based eggs.
Not so sunny side up?
Aside from inspecting their shells for damage before you place them in your trolley, you probably don’t pay much mind to the humble hen’s egg all that often.
Alan and his team of researchers do.
You see, eggs represent a bit of a stumbling block for the growing number of companies, inventors and academics racing to crack a perfect alternative that’s better for people, planet and livestock.
And that drive to produce new sources of protein is the focus of Alan’s professional life, with him a leading expert on legumes, vegetables, oilseeds and cereals.
“I think the issues of climate change and the number of highly processed, fatty, salty and sugary foods means we really need to diversify our diets,” Dr Alvarez explained.
“I’m fascinated by the fact that although we have such incredible biodiversity in the world, we are so limited in terms of what we actually eat.”
An area of growing interest
To try to change this, Alan is involved in a wide variety of plant-based projects, ranging from improving Britain’s capacity to produce texturised vegetable proteins to developing more delicious meat-free burgers.
In fact, he moved to the University of Leeds in 2019 to assemble his own team of researchers exploring all things protein, enticed by the enormous potential in this area in the UK.
“A lot of people are going vegan, vegetarian or flexitarian at the moment, whether it’s for environmental, health or ethical reasons,” Alan said.
“There’s huge interest among the public and in business to come up with tasty, nutritious products that solve some very pressing problems for the world today and in the future.”
But let’s get back to eggs.
Humane and resource efficient
Together with Leeds-based primary investigator Professor Brent Murray, KTP associate Dr Nur Liyana Sulaiman and co-investigator Luke Byrne from Plant Meat Limited, Alan is collaborating with industry to cook up a no-animal-required egg that could change the food industry forever.
In the UK alone, we eat almost 12.6 billion eggs every year, produced by approximately 38 million commercial egg-laying hens.
All too many of those chickens are sadly kept in poor conditions, while nearly 330 million male chicks – not useful for the food industry – are culled in Europe annually.
Even more birds are slaughtered during outbreaks of diseases like avian flu that can periodically disrupt a supply chain already vulnerable to our reliance on eggs, a not insignificant cause of food security concern.
“And then there’s the environmental footprint, because plant-based foods require so much less water, land and energy – not to mention the fact some people need alternative sources of protein because of allergies,” Alan added.
So, if perfecting the plant-based yolker is such a panacea, it begs one obvious question: why has nobody achieved it yet?
Making a vegan egg you can cook with
The big challenge for alternative meat food companies, is matching the remarkable versatility of the humble egg.
Scrambled. Fried. Poached. Boiled. Cooked into omelettes and quiches. Baked into cakes. Within each box, the culinary possibilities are endless, all thanks to the chemical properties that make it an ideal emulsifier and thickener.
“That is one of the big quirks of nature,” Dr Alvarez said. “And although we have come really far with science and technology, mimicking the properties that allow one single ingredient to be used perfectly for so many different things is very difficult to achieve.”
Understanding the behaviour of proteins under various conditions is also an incredibly technical and involved process, requiring the kind of equipment and laboratory spaces that many businesses simply do not have access to.
Collaborating for joint gain
Through this Knowledge Transfer Partnership, that problem is eased.
From state-of-the-art University of Leeds labs, Plant Meat Limited receives the expert assistance of Professor Murray, Dr Alvarez, with Dr Sulaiman’s involvement paid for thanks to Innovate UK funding.
In return, the researchers can access insights into the commercial side of plant-based foods, improving their understanding of what science needs to address in order to make a real-world impact.
For Alan, it’s an example of just the kind of partnership that is required to make progress in the world of plant-based foods.
“I moved to Leeds because I saw great potential in the UK,” said Dr Alvarez, who was previously a postdoctoral researcher at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s Saint-Hyacinthe Research and Development Centre and a scientist at an ingredients developer in Quebec.
The plant-based market has a lot of room to grow, and with more collaboration between academia, industry, government and the agricultural sector, we can really push it forward.
Alan’s team’s efforts to hone the ideal plant-based egg recently ended, with the project having recently been rated ‘Outstanding’ by Innovate UK.
“But the best thing is the industry is only really getting started with eggs,” he noted.
“There are all sorts of things on the table, such as engineering plant-based alternatives or precision fermentation to have even better nutritional properties like added fibre, vitamins and minerals.
What if we can not only create a new type of ‘egg’, but an entirely better one, too?
Traditional cultures, future foods
Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the work of Alan and his team is its sheer breadth. Aside from eggs, his researchers at Leeds are looking at many other sources of alternative proteins, in projects truly global in their scope.
“My colleague Professor Francisco Goycoolea and I spent two years working with Dr Nancy Chasquibol at the University of Lima, supported by the Peruvian government to help tackle the fact that 12% of under-fives suffer from malnutrition,” Dr Alvarez said. “There is an algae called cushuro, or nostoc sphaericum, that grows in the Peruvian Andes and looks a little bit like grapes."
Cushuro is eaten by some people who live high in the mountainous areas as part of their basic diet. It’s actually 35 to 42 per cent protein and also contains a lot of iron, so we studied it to determine how it might be used to develop functional foods that improve children’s health.
This is just one example of the lengths Alan and his peers will go to in order to help solve the many protein-related problems facing the planet today.
Laguna Cushuro, a lagoon some 4,000 metres above sea level and located on the outskirts of Huamachuco in Peru.
Laguna Cushuro, a lagoon some 4,000 metres above sea level and located on the outskirts of Huamachuco in Peru.
“Another project was back in Mexico, working in indigenous communities in very arid areas that only get between two and four millimetres of rain a year," he said.
“Despite that lack of water, they’re able to grow vegetables, so we were looking at what it is about the soil (and the microorganisms within it) that is enabling that and learning about their traditional methods of intercropping, known as ‘milpa’, that allow them to grow multiple foods in one place.”
Currently, Alan’s team is also trying to understand the impact of processing on a wide range of protein sources and their health benefits.
They are studying the potential of chia seeds as functional food ingredients, exploring how ayocote beans could be used to develop novel food formulations, researching the nutritional and bioactive properties of oat peptides, assessing the compositional characteristics of chickpea aquafaba, and analysing how processing pulses affects their protein quality, to name but a few.
Whether it’s eggs, algae or soil, Alan and his group are on a mission to make better-tasting, health-boosting alternative proteins a cost-effective and accessible reality.
And it could be only a matter of time before products engineered in Leeds are filling supermarket baskets up and down the country.
Experts
Dr Alan Javier Hernandez Alvarez
Alan is Lecturer in Nutrition and Global Health at the University of Leeds.
His research focuses on novel and emergent sources of proteins such as insects, algae, oilseeds, pulses, cereals and agri-food waste. The aim is to develop sustainable and efficient methods for extracting, isolating and purifying proteins and bioactive peptides from these sources, contributing to food security and innovation.
Alan’s research goals include understanding how proteins interact with other biomolecules within food matrices and how these interactions can affect the nutritional quality, functionality, physiological effects and bioavailability of proteins and other food components.
His expertise and research is at the forefront of developing innovative, sustainable and health-promoting food products, contributing to advancing our understanding of food science and nutrition while addressing global challenges related to food security, nutrition and health.
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