Call for partners | NovaMOO - Novel nutritious dairy alternatives

Nutrition and sustainability can and should go hand in hand. Dairy alternatives provide an excellent and underinvestigated opportunity to innovate in this domain. The goal of NovaMOO is to investigate the nutritional quality of such products and to assess the risk-benefit relation of the composition, matrix and additives used to make sustainable, healthy and delicious products. The project aims to cover a range of non-diary milk, yogurt or fresh cheese-like products, while sustainable medical foods or sports nutrition applications may be considered as well.

Using innovative in vitro approaches, nutrition and health impact can be assessed beyond protein quality and digestibility, by including carbohydrate and fat quality, as well as interactions and matrix effects. Depending on product composition, carbohydrate quality can include (speed of) glucose release and microbiota effects. 
Diary alternatives may contain emulsifiers that can impact (intestinal) health. We aim to evaluate specific emulsifiers in interaction with the fatty acid composition to assess impact on emulsions characteristics, fat metabolism, intestinal epithelium function and mucus production, and translocation of inflammatory mediators such as lipolysaccharide (LPS). Depending on partner interest, additional work can be done to include work on micronutrient bioavailability or to include a confirmatory human study to verify in vitro findings.

Research activities in the NovaMOO focus on nutrition and health aspects. We are therefore looking for innovation partners that can provide complementary research capabilities such as ingredient & product development, lab scale pilot production, product and/or sensory characterization, etc. In case any gaps remain, WFBR has a broad range of expertise and capabilities to ensure a comprehensive coverage of all requirements for a successful project.