Hydrosol braces for a flexitarian future with hybrid currywurst concept
11 Dec 2023 | Hydrosol
At Food Ingredients Europe 2023, Hydrosol introduced a German currywurst made of 40% vegetables — including red pepper, corn and onions. The flexitarian innovation reduces both costs and fat in the final product and could serve as a model for next-gen meat products. Katharina Burdorf explains how hybrids will be essential to future foods in the scaling up of cultivated meat.
This is Missy Green at FIE 2023.
I'm here with Katerina who's the team lead product management at Hydrasol.
So Katerina, what is Hydrasol's showcasing here today?
Here at FIE in Frankfurt, Hydrao is showcasing various things, but I think one thing that is very popular here for people coming around is the hybrid sausage that we are showcasing here.
So it's like a German currywurst, as I think everyone knows, but with about 40% of veggies inside.
What sort of vegetables are in there?
Oh, berries.
This can be very flexible, but in this case these are various kinds of paprika, some corn, some onions, and yeah, everything would taste good in sausage.
So what are, what are some of the advantages of a hybrid product?
As you can imagine, you can reduce the meat content in such a product to quite a great amount, so almost 40% of veggies.
We have also with the same system some recipes where you can achieve even like 50% of veggies inside.
And yeah, it's an economical reason on the one side, so you can definitely reduce costs as meat is going to be more and more expensive and we've seen price increases already in the last year, especially in Germany, inflation rates and so on, so the meat consumption is decreasing actually, so this might be a more.
Solution for a classic German currywurst and what of course is also fit to mention, it has some, some health benefits, so it has a reduced fat content, reduced cholesterol content, and increased fiber content due to the veggies.
So yeah, that's the benefits of it.
Are there any sort of special technical considerations when you're combining meat and veggies like that?
Yeah, it's it's quite difficult about the texture to achieve the right bite and everything, even if you have such a great amount of veggies inside.
So it's yeah, in many cases it's just going to be too soft and you don't have this right bite.
So it's all about the right recipe and the right ingredients that we use in here.
So what do you envision will be sort of the next phase of this, these hybrid solutions?
Yeah, of course for now we see hybrid products that combine conventional meat and veggies, for example, or in some markets like in Austria we see meat combined with plant-based texture rates.
That's the current status.
But of course something that everyone is talking about is hybrid products in different contexts.
Context of cellular agriculture, so we are talking about cultured meat in here which is not going to be on the market directly as a fully cultivated product and that it's not on the market like this right now.
What is in Singapore or in the US are hybrid products means they contain plant-based ingredients, but They improve mouth feel, texture, flavor and everything.
So the improvement is coming from the cultivated ingredients, especially cultivated fat can bring really like the extra 5% that is very difficult to achieve with a purely plant-based product.
Do you see precision fermentation also having a role in these types of hybrid products in the future?
Precision fermentation is such a broad field that definitely can play a role in different kinds.
There are some companies out there who work on precision fermented egg proteins, for example, which can be useful in hybrid products because, for example, in our system for the hybrid sausage or the other hybrid products, there is egg protein inside.
So this could be replaced with precision fermentation, and the other thing is that precision fermentation might be a driver for cultured meat production, for example, as some specific ingredients that are used for the nutritional media to feed the cultured cells can be produced via precision fermentation, so it's a very Yeah, broad fields, and you, it's hard to say what, what everything you can do with it, but for now, a lot that you can imagine.
How do you see cellular agriculture and precision fermentation taking shape with relate to with relation to how expensive it is right now?
Do you see those prices ever really coming down significantly?
Yeah, when the first cultured meat burger has been presented 10 years ago for like $325,000 and research costs in there, this was definitely something where we came way down now, so it's much cheaper right now, but it would be still too expensive to bring onto the market a fully cultivated product and even in most cases a hybrid product because scaling is just not there.
But there are some estimations that for example for the precision fermentation, for precision fermented ingredients, the price parity might be achieved in about 2 years, but of course it depends on the ingredient and so on.
But to bring, for example, into meat products the right taste and texture with this kind of ingredients, because there are companies on the market who sell their precision fermented ingredients and they can support this.
And for cultured meat, the estimations are more for about beginning of, , 2030, so like 32, , yeah, is one of the estimations.
But of course there are some startups out there who say like, no, we, we can do this even faster.
We are going to have price parity in 2028 or something, so no one knows what the future brings, but the faster it goes, I think the better it is in the end.
Do you think that the European Union will ever allow cellular agriculture?
For precision fermentation, yeah, I think so, because what many people don't know about precision fermentation is a technology that is used since the 1970s for the production of insulin, for example, so for medical reasons, but also for the production of rennet that is used for cheese production, so for microbial rennet, so it's not that different or new.
I think this should be something that is going to happen for cultured meat.
I'm trying to be optimistic and saying yes, someday that's going to happen, although of course there recently have been some announcements, for example, by the Italian government, which of course are not going into the into this direction, you can say.
But I think the European Union has to do it in the end to not leave this innovation to other regions like the US and Asia or not to leave it there only, but to play a role in this and to feed also the yeah their own population.
That's something that should be thought about.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
