food Marketing & Technology 3/2022

Ingredients
“Consumers have been showing
increasingly individual needs for
years, and the desire for new products,
especially in the plant-based segment,
is great,” says Katharina Haack,
Product Manager Health & Nutrition,
GoodMills Innovation GmbH.
No room for compromise
However, despite the apparent
widespread consumer appetite
for plant-based foods, there is
an important hurdle that anyone
developing new products has to
overcome – how to deliver an
enjoyable meat or fish-like texture. If
the mouthfeel isn’t right, consumers
will not purchase again. Texture is the
key to successful alternatives, and
it is an area where manufacturers
cannot afford to compromise.
The ideal is to be able to reproduce
the original product in such a way
that no major differences in texture
can be perceived. This is called “meat
mimicking” – the art of recreating
bite and mouthfeel for an authentic
taste experience. Processors
therefore need to pay close
attention to the fibrosity and other
sensory characteristics of the plant
ingredients they choose, whatever
the desired product concept may be.
GoodMills Innovation has long been
involved in the creation of plantbased
proteins and has developed
a hassle-free solution that allows
food producers to overcome texture
issues with ease. Its new VITATEX®
range is convincing both in terms
of authenticity and texture, and is
simple to process too. Available in
a range of options, it can be used to
successfully replace meat in all sorts
of conventional pork, beef, poultry
and fish-based applications.
A simple swap
With VITATEX®, it is easy for meat
processing plants to produce plantbased
alternatives. The texturates
exhibit such close parallels to
conventional meat mass that
manufacturers can use the same
machines to produce meat-free,
patties, nuggets or cutlets as they do
for meat processing. The texturates
are pre-swollen and can simply be
further processed to the required
size in a cutter or mincer, just as a
regular meat-based minced mass
would be. This means that no major
manufacturing investment in new
equipment is required.
In terms of other sensory perameters,
the texturates have different, lighter
and darker shades of yellow, and each
achieves a specific sensory sensation
in the final product. Long, coarser fibers
and short, finer fibers can be achieved,
14 food Marketing & Technology • June 2022