Project since 2025
Nature-inspired sweetness through precision fermentation — intense taste, protein metabolism, and a path beyond sugar and chemical sweeteners.
Sweet proteins such as thaumatin can be thousands of times sweeter than sucrose. They deliver strong sweetness while being metabolized as proteins rather than as sugars or synthetic sweetener molecules.
That makes them attractive for reduced-sugar foods and beverages — without the same concerns often associated with sugar or many chemical alternatives, such as calorie load, dental health, or metabolic side effects.
Today, many sweet proteins still depend on plant extraction. Supply is limited, seasonal, and hard to expand to the scale of a global ingredients market.
WFFI develops sweet proteins through precision fermentation, using microbial hosts to produce nature-inspired sweetness in a more controllable and scalable way.
Thermostability remains critical. Proteins must keep their taste performance through pasteurization, baking, formulation, and storage.
Our work aims to make fermentation-derived sweet proteins practical for real food systems — not only expressive in the lab, but stable under industrial processing conditions.
Build yeast strains for sweet protein production
Optimize structure for stability and sweetness
Evaluate performance under processing conditions
Compare sweetness retention after treatment
Advance promising candidates with NewPro
Explore formulation routes for real products
By combining protein engineering with fermentation process development, we aim to create sweet proteins that remain functional through heat treatment and industrial handling.
Research direction and AI-assisted protein redesign are driven at WFFI in Wageningen. Pilot production and experimental validation can be advanced with NewPro, helping move concepts toward practical manufacturing.
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