Fi Asia 2025: Ohly and AB Enzymes discuss yeast extracts and enzymes for bakery salt reduction and softness
22 Sep 2025 | Ohly
Christine Schwarz, applications scientist lead at Ohly, and Jaizel Castillo, application development manager, Bake ASPAC at Ohly’s sister company AB Enzymes, speak with us about their enzymes for baking applications that enhance bread softness and texture. They also explain how Ohly’s yeast extracts help bakery manufacturers in salt reduction, MSG replacement, and savory-sweet combinations.
Hello everybody.
This is William Bradford Nichols here for Food Ingredients First, and I am live at Food Ingredients Asia in Bangkok, Thailand, and we are sitting down today with Christine Schwartz, the application science lead at Oli.
Hello, Christine, how are you?
Hello, I'm good.
How are you?
I'm great.
It's great to see you.
And we also have with us Gisele, Castillo.
The application development manager for Bake Bake ASPAC at AB Enzymes.
Hello, Joel, how are you today?
I'm good.
How are you?
I'm great.
It's exciting to be here with you guys today.
I've got some questions already, and if it's OK, I'd love to jump right in.
Yeah.
Can you tell us about sort of your main focuses and innovations for this year's show?
And we should focus for this year, yeah, yeah, for the show.
So basically, I'm from AB Enzymes and our focus is to like introduce our enzymes for baking application for food application and other applications that we have like feed application, like protein.
Protein hydrolysis, something like that, and also food processing and our main business is more on the baking, so most of our enzymes go to the baking application.
So we actually have a lot of concepts now in our booth that we are showcasing more of our enzymes for bakery applications.
I'm working for Oli.
Oli produces some yeast extracts and culinary powders.
We are our headquarters is in Hamburg and we have a site in America as.
Yeast extracts can go into a huge variety of applications and it is a known ingredient, for example, replacement or also salt reduction, and we are showing also a concept for salt reduction in bakery.
Actually, it also is a shared concept between AB enzymes and oli, and we are addressing their.
Huge trend in reducing salt because simply for health reasons.
Absolutely.
So speaking of that concept, I see this really delicious looking bun with some ice cream there.
Can you guys tell us about the concept that you have before you?
Sure, yeah, so, what we have here is, it's a collagen in which miso vanilla ice cream in soft bun.
So basically it's a brioche bun.
So this concept is very local.
When you say local, it's Common for, for this region, which is Asia Pacific.
So, you can see this kind of concept of putting ice cream in a bun and basically like consuming it as a snack or something like a dessert sometimes.
So this concept is actually very good because, you can have the, the softness of the bun, for example, and then the, the ice cream.
So it's kind of like very indulgent.
But then at the same time we are like promoting our products here.
So for example, in the bun, we are Having our enzymes for softness.
So when we say enzymes for softness, it's enhancing or improving the softness or the texture of the bread and very much applicable to this kind of concept because you want to have a soft bun.
You want to have a more good eating quality for the bread and for the ice cream, if you can give explanation.
Yeah, sure, sure.
So as yeast extracts might not be very known.
As yeast extracts might be more known to go into the savory applications because of delivering straightforward umami and long-lastingness through nucleotides, it might be a little bit surprising to find yeast extract actually in an ice cream.
So the second trend, besides the whole concept itself, we are addressing the still ongoing trend for having sweet and savory.
All combined together as like salted caramel, for example, and while we were concepting this, we had a we had a working title actually which was Indulgence Meets Science because the enzyme is a very, very technical technical topic ingredient, whereas yeast extracts delivers bold flavor and bold umami.
So we found.
I found that quite a funny, a funny headline to work with.
And so the ice cream, the only products inside are two yeast extracts, and I use the top flavor from a flavor house, and the top flavor brings those tangy fermented notes as miso is fermented soybeans and the umami heart, I like to say, so like the.
Richness, the whole umami body and the long lastingness comes from the yeast extracts, and I worked with a combination of a standard savory building block which delivers through the glutamic acid content, delivers straight umami, and on top I put a higher nucleotide one which develops more the top note and brings this long lastingness of the umami heart.
This ice cream, that's exciting.
This, I think this really shows the versatility of both of your ingredients.
Could you tell me a little bit more about what other sort of formats or or or ways that your ingredients can be used and what other formats they'd be good for as far as, like you mentioned bakery.
Is there, what other ways can the ingredients can be used?
Yeah, so for our enzymes, for AV enzymes, we have like Von enzymes.
So these enzymes goes with to to.
Bakery applications.
So when we talk about bakery, it's not just like the bread itself, but also we're going to the flour mill industries, we're going to the bread improver premixes.
So those kind of products, it has enzymes inside and that is going to the different bakery applications.
So not just limited to bread but also limited, but also to other applications such as noodles, steamed buns, also to cake application.
We also have like Flatbread application, pasta application, so it's a variety of actually wheat-based kind of products and applications.
So this is where the enzyme goes basically and enzyme is a very functional ingredient.
So when we're talking about enzyme, how can, what is the value of enzyme in these products, it's more of the, the textural, more of the, the quality of the bread itself.
So for example, talking about how enzyme can.
In the volume of the bread, how can it help to improve the structure, how to improve the stability of the dough.
So that is what enzyme can do basically.
And when it comes to the texture, it's more on the softness, increasing the shelf life of the bread in terms of eating quality, better eating quality.
So that is the value that we are bringing to the market.
And Christine, can you do the same?
Tell us a little bit about the application.
So yeast extract, as I mentioned before, is a known ingredient.
It comes from fermentation of yeast cells.
You grow, you nourish them, and then you break down through enzymes, actually the cell wall, and extract the proteins where you gain this glutamic, glutamic acid and high.
And nucleotide content.
So that is the background of yeast extract, and yeast extracts are found in a huge variety of applications going from broth, for example, like stock broth, soups, ready to eat meals, snacking, for example, every seasoning, also bakery in the stream, so basically, Everywhere where you want to enhance taste or want to have this umami inside of your of your applications and as mentioned before, yeast extracts can be a solution for a variety of different.
Different opportunities that the food industry might might need to tackle as salt reduction, for example, where you take out the salt.
The salt actually is really important for taste.
You will immediately recognize.
Is less than when there is less salt in the formulation and you reduce it, and yeast extracts can help with that because it enhances the whole flavor profile and brings a savorines which makes up for the missing salt.
