Plant-based foods
Enticing people to change their eating habits, especially to try alternative meat products, is a challenge for food tech companies because people want that product to taste, smell and feel like actual meat.
Yali Bio is one company that thinks it has cracked that code by focusing on designer fats for plant-based meat and dairy products. It is building a platform to tailor-make fats aimed at enhancing the flavor of alternative meats.
The process involves synthetic biology, deep learning and genomics tools that produce fats that are more sustainable than the current oils, like coconut, that are used in plant proteins, but also mimic animal-based analogs in terms of flavor and texture, CEO Yulin Lu told TechCrunch.
