Startup moves beyond the lab with alt-dairy ingredient

Nourish Ingredients has teamed up with Australia’s Food and Beverage Accelerator (FaBA) to bring its latest ingredient, Creamilux, to market.

The ingredient serves as an alternative to conventional fat choices for plant-based foods including coconut oil and palm oil.

“Fat is a very important component of any plant-based meat or dairy, but companies were using coconut and palm oils, which have environmental concerns and don’t deliver the taste and sensory experience of traditional dairy products,” said Dr Surinder Singh, Chief Scientist at Nourish Ingredients.

“We harnessed our founding team’s deep expertise in fat and lipid production to create Tastilux and Creamilux, both complex systems of fat-like lipids manufactured sustainably to make meat and dairy products people actually want to eat.”

Solving scale-up challenges

Compared to conventional food oils, Creamilux is unusually rich in phospholipids, which makes it highly viscous and difficult to manufacture using standard industrial processes.

Moving from a lab-scale ingredient to one that could be incorporated into dairy products — and be produced in the tonnes needed for commercial volumes — required capabilities and infrastructure beyond Nourish Ingredients’ in-house capacity.

FaBA’s co-investment scheme, which provides non-dilutive funding to access capabilities and facilities across three universities, allowed Nourish Ingredients to create a market-ready product more quickly and cost-effectively.

Through FaBA’s Premium Food and Beverage Program, Nourish Ingredients partnered with University of Queensland researchers led by Professor Jason Stokes in the UQ School of Chemical Engineering to develop a framework linking structure, viscosity and functionality to measure and predict how Creamilux behaves in different products and formulations.

This work revealed that Creamilux’s performance varied across different products. Understanding these interactions at the molecular level, and how they influence flow behaviour, viscosity, stability and product texture, allowed the researchers to adopt a targeted, data-driven approach to advise Nourish Ingredients on the optimal formulations to trial, alongside suitable processing conditions.

The research enabled more reliable and predictable processing at scale, resulting in a data package that Nourish Ingredients has used to attract interest from major Australian and international dairy companies.

“The original lab-based purification method relied on an approach that was not practical for most manufacturers to implement safely at commercial scale,” Singh said. “Our Nourish Ingredients and UQ teams developed a water-based purification method; a first for phospholipid production.

“We also mapped the temperature and pressure conditions that made the mixture flowable enough to pump through the tanks and reactors used in commercial production.”

Dr Chris Downs, FaBA Director, said Nourish Ingredients was selected for investment due to Creamilux’s strong commercial potential and the company’s willingness to co-invest and work closely with FaBA researchers.

“Nourish Ingredients presented a compelling investment case and clear company strategy that showed the work we could do together would result in a new ingredient available in Australian and global markets in a short timeframe,” Downs said.

Singh said there were many benefits to collaborating with FaBA.

“FaBA offers deep technical expertise in food structure and functionality, access to world-class research infrastructure, and a very collaborative model of engagement,” he said. “The team was responsive and showed a clear desire to go above and beyond to deliver solutions and apply their experience working with similar industries and companies.”

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