Finnish company demonstrates new technology for extracting umami from grain side streams

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Backed by a total of 3.1 million in grants to date, Finland’s Nordic Umami Company is looking to scale its fermentation-based technology and meet the challenge of bringing umami taste to plant-based foods in a closed-loop system .

In 2021, the company launched a fermentation-based technology to extract umami from plant-based industry byproducts, followed by the company’s first commercial product, Meatless Umami Bouillon, which it claims is one of the earliest sources of umami completely natural and sustainable.

Now the company aims to turn the technology into an industrial-scale pilot plant and further develop its products and portfolio for the food industry.

While the Nordic Umami Company focuses on the industrial umami market, it has also made its first three products available for retail as a proof of concept.

The emissions-reducing benefits of switching to a plant-based diet are well documented. Yet many people are still put off by the taste of alternative proteins. Or rather, their lack of taste. Plant-based food often lacks what people naturally crave: umami, deliciousness, said Eetu Viuhkonen, CEO of Nordic Umami Company.

We found the original idea for natural umami through a real-life problem, added Reetta Kivel, CIO and co-founder of Nordic Umami Company. We realized that the options for bringing umami to plant foods were limited. All the alternatives had problems of health, naturalness or sustainability. However, vegan food must also have the fifth basic taste, umami.”

With two patents pending, the company develops and produces what it calls all-natural and sustainable umami from circular ingredients, with the aim of accelerating the transition to a fully sustainable food system.

Her mission, she says, is not only to make vegetarian food delicious, but also to recycle edible food that would otherwise go to waste.

The need for clean-label umami is increasing globally,” Viuhkonen said.

The company says its technology is a new take on traditional fermentation processes that create flavors and alter the chemical and physical structures of foods. The magic behind our process is that it’s done not with machinery, but by nature’s workers themselves: microbes, Viuhkonen explained. Our technology is based on nature enhancing nature. Our innovative vision of fermentation allows us to use a wide range of raw materials with different texture and taste characteristics. In this way, more types of base flavors are used to create umami-rich liquids and solids. Unlike many other technologies, we can use a wide variety of plant-based ingredients in different formats and flavors both fresh and dried.

The company uses a wide range of by-products such as side streams from vegetable processing and packaging, various grain side streams and spent grain from beer.

This makes it a sustainable and all-natural process, Viuhkonen told FoodNavigator. We use natural fermentation to produce our products and use by-products from the food industry as raw materials instead of uncontaminated food. This approach helps prevent food loss by redirecting otherwise discarded edible food grown for human consumption back into the food system and human consumption.

The company has so far secured numerous customers in Finland and abroad with its first application produced at the company’s pilot plant in Espoo, a city near Helsinki.

It is now developing and building its own unique pilot line with a planned maximum monthly capacity of 30 tons per month.

This allows us to enter the B2B segment and create proofs of concept ahead of A-round industrial investments, Viuhkonen told us.

“Our main focus from a product perspective is B2B umami solid and liquid ingredients and food service,” he stressed. However, the company has also launched B2C products as a proof of concept in Finland. -suppliers of materials whose by-products will be used in production.”

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