New marketable, nutritious, and sustainable mycelium-based food from food industry residues

This project addresses the looming global food crises through an innovative, sustainable, and efficient food production solution, by transformation low-value food industry residues to healthy, nutritional and market competitive mycelium-based food products.

Oat residues and brewer’s spent grains, that are produced in enormous volumes will be used as substrates for an advanced solid-state fermentation (SSF) using edible fungi.

Then, this nutrient-dense mycelium-based food ingredient is formulated into premium food products with consumer desired taste and texture.

Its market for rapid introduction to food service in this project, and in next phase into retails and mass production are investigated. Various sustainable development goals (SDGs) are considered. As new food from food residues in Sweden and internationally, it will contribute to SDG 2 and 3.

Unlike other plant- and mycelium-based commercialized meat analogues, the SSF produced mycelium-based food in this project promotes sustainability and resilience in food systems as they are processed minimally (not ultra-processed), contain no synthetic binders and additives (SDG 3), produced from upcycled residues (SDG 12), production process is very eco-friendly and climate-positive, substantially low on water and energy consumption and GHG emissions (SDG 6 and 13).

The project performs a thorough market analysis for the new mycelium-based foods in addition to the stringent program for consumer education on climate-smart food.