Melt&Marble: Enhancing flavor in alternative meats and dairy with precision-fermented fat
15 Apr 2026 | Melt&Marble
Swedish biotech Melt&Marble has secured self-affirmed GRAS status for its precision-fermented fat, which it says improves flavor delivery in alternative meats and dairy. Head of product, Paulo Teixeira, explains how “MeltyMarble” outperforms conventional plant fats with gradual melting and natural flavor release. While the company targets an FDA “no questions” letter by next year, Teixeira highlights that EU regulatory approval is a tougher challenge for precision-fermented ingredients.
Hello and welcome.
This is Insha Noreen from CNS Media, journalist at Food Ingredient First.
Swedish biotech company, Melt and Marble, has secured self-affirmed grass status for its precision fermented melty marble fat.
Which helps manufacturers optimize flavor delivery and melting behavior in their products.
Paulo Teixeira, Melt and Marbles head of product, is joining us today to tell us more about it.
It's very nice to be back here at Food and Greens first, so happy to take this interview.
We are really delighted to have you back, Paulo.
So, my first question is, what does the grass milestone mean in practical terms for food manufacturers in the US which are looking to incorporate your ingredients into products?
Yeah, so thanks for the question.
So the self, self-affirmed grass process is really like the minimum, legal requirements that we need to sell a novel ingredient into the US market.
So, in that sense, the self-affirmed grass, unlocks, the ability for us to legally sell as a food ingredient in the US for any food manufacturer that wants to create products, with our, with, the fat product we just registered right now, melty marble.
And, and make use of its applications.
We are aware that a lot of, larger manufacturers and a lot of manufacturers in the space are looking for a no questions letter from the FDA and the self self-affirmed grass is not really, , good enough for that level, and for that matter, we are also pursuing that, approval from official approval from the FDA.
After this, after this step, so we are, we're in contact with the FDA right now and submitting the dossier, and we should actually expect also this no questions letter, in the frame that it takes the FDA to evaluate, so probably a year's time or so.
OK, great.
And how do you think that melty marble technically outperforms conventional plant fats, which are used in alternative meat or dairy formulations?
Melting marble is a.
Essentially made to to have a unique melting profile and flavor delivery, and in that sense, it becomes quite a unique fat in in comparison to to current alternatives that are, what's one of the most currently used alternatives, for example, is the coconut oil or coconut fat, the the solid version.
And if we compare it just like 1 to 1, you can see that melting marble has a much gradual melting behavior, so there's really a melting curve, that is a lot more similar to, for example, animal type of fats, and also the flavor delivery goes together with this, so it actually you do feel a gradual flavor being released in a quite a natural way.
Rather than just a, a peak melting and a peak release, and then, which is present in a lot of the plant-based, fats.
With that said, is a semi-solid fat, so, it's able to deliver a lot of advantages related to plant-based oils, for example, which are fully liquid and give more of an oily feeling rather than a, than a juiciness and the and the fullness in terms of the sensory of the product.
OK.
And how can precision fermented fats really help solve the challenges like dryness or weak flavor release in plant-based products?
So it's a lot related to what I just, explained a little bit, and I do like to see things as like currently the alternative, alternative protein or, plant-based, products in the market, it's kind of like locked within.
A space of what is possible, right, because you are, you, you have to use, for example, for your fat component or oil component, what exists today, available in the plant world.
So, the, the magic here is that through the precision fermentation you can design fats with unique novel properties, that means.
That this visibility space you're operating on suddenly gets unlocked to a whole new level, and suddenly we have properties here that you cannot find in a natural, plant-based fat or or oil, and we, we do see that with that and even also in combination with what already exists, you can actually access a whole new space of how, The fat melts, how it, how it delivers flavor, for example, how it actually stays in your mouth without being a waxy feeling that you get with hydrogenated fats, for example, so, so we do believe really this is a unique solution that that gives a tool that was much needed and that was never there before.
OK, that's really interesting.
And, which food category do you think the fats can be used in, to provide commercial opportunities?
So there's a variety of spaces where this, this fat ingredient that we actually are now releasing could act on, we have of course historically been a lot focused on the meat alternative market, but that market as we know, has taken a bit of a downturn and there's not so much, appetite for innovation and and and novelty within that space right now.
Meanwhile we have actually found.
Or design this this fat to be a very interesting application for the dairy, alternative dairy market, for example.
And that's where we've seen actually a lot of interesting applications on it when it comes to, creams, for example, and cheeses and spreads, we see that the ingredient itself helps bring out a lot of more like, for example, buttery notes and dairy like notes in the product while while giving really a really nice mouth feel that is usually very much preferred.
And on the other hand, it's also like there's a whole space that we're also now exploring, which is just improving health of foods in general, so we here we essentially have a solid fat with still a high amount of unsaturated fats and healthy fatty acids in its profile.
Ah, but which basically unlocks like a whole spectrum of you can just simply improve traditional foods, let's say, like, take a cheese or something like actual dairy cheese, and you can actually improve the health profile without having to have unhealthy fats added to it, you can instead use an ingredient like ours to actually improve that profile.
So that is a bit what we're looking into like.
Health, more health focused applications, alternative dairy and, and such for the current current products we have, but actually, there's more in the pipeline, right?
We are also working on something, that will be fats very much used for chocolate and confectionery, for example, and that is completely set of properties that you're looking into.
Meaning that is not the product we are talking today, that is self grass, that it will be another separate actually regulatory approval since it's a significant different product, and with that said, there's more products on the pipeline like that, so we're really designing to deliver in the solutions in, in different foods areas and with that said, we're constantly open to discovering what is really next focus it should be, so we welcome very much that dialogue with customers.
OK.
And when you talk about the different applications, when you conducted the product testing, was there any specific application where you were surprised by the results of the fermented path?
Yeah, I think so.
I, I think when, when we use, when we created melting marble, we did design it to deliver, Quite some interesting aspects on melting and flavor delivery, for example, what we did not expect is in applications such as creams, for example, that besides that, we also saw like very much like stability benefits, for example, where, where other plant-based formulations would actually fail, we saw that ours could deliver added stability and for example, like cooking the product and things like that, we also see that.
There's a again talking about, for example, cream and and frostings and such that our fat has a unique whipping property, so it could actually whip in ways that essentially no other also plant-based fats can do right now, and that also unlocks like a whole space, so there's a whole aspect of functionality when it comes to, How you make a product and how you want it to perform and behave, not so that it's not direct to the consumer sensory part, but, It's definitely their advantages that we see and we see very interesting, very much interest from customers in these, in these aspects.
OK.
And, precision fermented fats is really an emerging, exciting category.
So do you think 5 years from now, it will be like a niche ingredient or a mainstream component in food formulation?
There is nothing like conceptually stopping it from going mainstream.
We do have precision fermentation ingredients mainstream today, thinking about, you know, citric acid, for example, it's been around for 100 years, being constantly used in food and vitamins that are constantly added to food, they're done in the same way.
So conceptually, it's not there, but essentially there's two big barriers that currently will determine, will this go mainstream or be a niche application.
And that's pricing and manufacturing costs on one side and regulatory processes on the other.
Here we're talking about regulatory success in the US for example, but for the EU this is still a battle we're struggling with and, and it will take a lot of, a lot of time and every new ingredient will have to go through the same battle, you know, so it's very difficult to bring them to market.
Then the manufacturing and pricing costs is of course you need scale, you need to.
To develop those and takes time and and resources to get there and.
You know, we're talking about a new way of making food that should be mainstream that is not benefiting, for example, from, financial support that other areas of food making actually have like animal farming, for example, is constantly subsidized by multiple governments while technologies like what we are doing we are making food in a more sustainable way, better for, for the planet.
They're not really supported in the same way, so, so there's a lot of factors here in play, it's very hard to say how mainstream is it going to be.
