Mycorena, one of the fastest-growing food-tech companies known for their mycoprotein, now announce their latest breakthrough innovation using Fungi. 

For the first time in the plant-based food industry, Mycorena is launching a unique fungi-based fat ingredient, creating a profile of sensations that you would find in a juicy steak. This presents a new and superior ingredient that can enhance taste similarly to fat in animal meat, taking plant-based meat to the next level.

Finding the right fat substitute has proven to be one of the biggest challenges for the plant-based industry. Until now, other plant-based products have not managed to achieve the complexity and sought-after characteristics of animal fat that are essential to the experience of eating a steak, for example. This is because the flavor in your steak is not found in the meat itself but in the fat that surrounds it. 

"The point is that the flavor in animal fat is released when we cook our meat, in turn dispersing of its flavors to give you that tasty experience of the whole meat", explains Dr. Paulo Teixeira, Chief Innovation Officer at Mycorena.

The products you find on the market now use plain vegetable-based oils, such as coconut oil and rapeseed oil, as fat ingredients. The problem is, they melt quickly upon cooking and have a much flatter release of flavors compared to animal-based meat products. Therefore, achieving greater complexity in this area is imperative to attaining plant-based meat products that give consumers the desired experience. 

With the power of fungi and their proprietary technology, Mycorena will now offer the plant-based industry a new ingredient that enables the release of flavor in the sense that animal fat does when cooking and eating it. The company is already busy implementing it into their current food applications, such as mycoprotein-based burgers, chicken filés, and whole cut meats. 

This news opens a vast array of opportunities for the industry and the development of future plant-based meat. 

"We’re excited to bring fungi beyond mycoprotein, and we want to integrate our customers into our beta-testing program as soon as possible, where they can get access to test our solution already within the next few months", says Dr. Paulo Teixeira, CIO.

If you are also interested in this latest development within the plant-based food industry, you know whom to turn to!