IFT First 2025: Biospringer serves up flavor innovation with “bitter blockers” for alt-sweeteners
18 Jul 2025 | Biospringer by Lesaffre
Andrew Vasina, North America culinary center manager, spoke to us about how Biospringer uses fermentation to develop natural flavor solutions. He highlighted yeast extracts that enhance umami in savory foods and bitter blockers that mask off-notes in sweeteners and botanicals. Vasina also noted that fermentation is central to Biospringer’s clean label approach and supports the growing demand for transparency and natural ingredients.
Footing greens first performance from IFT 2025 in Chicago, and we're head to Barry Springwe the Safrasan with Andrew Bassina, who is culinary center manager for North America.
Welcome to you.
Nice.
So my first question, how does Maxiro enhance saucy, meaty, and umami flavors in savory products like snacks and soups?
So the maximum product range are products that are naturally high in umami containing compounds.
Today we're featuring the Maximum Prime, which is one of our newest launches here.
So it's a synergistic mix of naturally occurring IG and glutamic acid, which is really going to intensify and create really strong flavor profiles and.
Wide array of food products.
So bringing fullness in the mouth, really intensifying salty, savory, meaty flavors all across the board, really great tool for bringing intense flavor profiles to food.
That's great.
And can you tell us more about what makes Maxiro yeast extracts ideal for creating intense natural flavors and bouillons and cheese, cheese snacks?
Yeah, so, you know, like I was just mentioning, I think these products are, are really great sources of, of natural umami.
So that would be a little bit of IPOs.
Little bit of buttamic acid or a mix of the two in the, in the case of the prime.
And these are things that are really going to intensify flavors.
You think of vuyung, you think of full in the mouth, you think of cheese, you think of creaminess, you think of, a really punch of flavor and umami is a really great tool to make all those things pop and really come forward and, and exemplify all the natural flavors in there that are really strong and, and what you look for when you go for food.
OK.
And if we turn our attention to Springer mask, how does this product neutralize off?
And ingredients like sweeteners and botanicals.
Yeah, so the Sprinter mask range, we have two items in that range.
We're launching the mask 102 here at IFT this year for North America, and these products are really unique in that they're, they're bitter blockers, so they're actually going to block the bitter receptors in the mouth, which allows you to really tone down and completely remove sometimes some of the off notes that come with alternative sweeteners, botanicals, and other bitter compounds.
The mask 102, our, our new launch.
Is actually a cultured yeast extract and is really going to be effective at some of the earthy notes that come with botanicals, Effective as for a lot of plant proteins that have some of the similar earthy, grassy, bitter notes that sometimes can make foods unpleasant.
OK, can you elaborate on how Springer mask taps into demand for clean label and health-focused products?
Yes, so this product again is just it's a cultured yeast extract, so something that's very clean label.
Something that people understand and people are comfortable with.
And it allows you to remove some of the off notes from some of these more, interesting clean label items that, that are bringing health and wellness to foods.
It also allows you to, to avoid using, things that may be less clean label or of course, another solution for masking bitter off notes is to add more salt, more sugar, things like this, these typically can help with covering up some bitterness in foods.
This allows you Keep that same flavor profile, you'd want that desirable mix without having to add those extra things that may reduce the nutritional content overall.
That's interesting.
And as a final question, how does Maximum and Springer mask align with the growing demand for transparent natural ingredient sourcing?
So everything we do at Lassa is really based on fermentation.
Fermentation is our bread and butter.
BioSpringer is really focused on fermentation ingredients for the food industry, the food and beverage industry.
And so that natural fermentation process allows us to extract things out of nature in a way that really is clean label and really in a way that people are looking for in their food.
It's very transparent.
The fermentation process is quite simple.
The vast majority of our ingredients, the maxiro and the mass products we talked about today, are really, derived from yeast, that same yeast that, bakers use to bake bread.
And then we're utilize our expertise in fermentation to really extract the most out of those, those yeasts, to create either a strong umami for flavor enhancement or those bitter blocking molecules which are going to be used to help mask in the mask products.
Andrew, thanks for your time today.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
