50 million to revolutionize sustainable plant-based food production

A significant part of the green transition relies on our food system and consumption. We must produce with much less resource use, and we need to eat more plant based. But our current plant-based food system relies on elaborate and resource-heavy processes that break down raw materials, such as seeds or legumes, only to reassemble the remains into new ingredients, using vast quantities of water and energy throughout the process, and resulting in significant nutrient loss.

However, Professor Remko Boom, who is joining the Department of Food Science from March 1^st, is aiming to revamp that process. He is working on improving mild processing methods, by combining food science and artificial intelligence to understand and predict plant proteins’ behaviour during mild processing. And to do that, Remko Boom has been awarded a Novo Nordisk Foundation RECRUIT grant of DKK 50 mil. for the project AI4NaturalFood that will run over the next 7 years.

“Rather than the elaborate and costly process of breaking down raw materials and then rebuilding a product from the resulting refined ingredients, we’re going to use much simpler methods to create enriched fractions and then use AI to predict how we can combine them into good foods. With these simpler, milder methods we can recover more of the nutrients, and can retain part of the original structure of the raw material. We have already proven the principle and got some very nice products from it. And most importantly, we can do it with a lot less energy and water use,” says Remko Boom.

Aiming for complexity

Mild processing retains more of the plant’s natural structure and composition when compared to the traditional processing methods. This makes mild processing more complex to work with, simply because there are many factors in play. But with the emergence of AI, it is exactly those complex processes that we can aim for, according to Remko Boom.

“Food is fundamentally very complex. A piece of bread contains hundreds of different substances interacting with each other: there’s a molecular structure, a colloidal structure, a microscale structure, macroscale structure – there’s structure everywhere. And this structure largely determines the properties. In food science we traditionally tried to reduce these complexities, to make it possible to understand what is happening. I think that now is the time that we, as food scientists, should not shy away from the complexity, but instead aim for it. With the availability of AI, we can begin to capture all these interactions and use them rather than trying to avoid them,” says Remko Boom.

To do this, Remko Boom, who has spent the past 26 years working on plant-based foods and other subjects at Wageningen University, is starting a new research group at the Department of Food Science, called Food Materials Engineering. He will be working closely with data scientists from the Department of Computer Science. All these efforts will let the project develop new methods for experimentation that generate sufficient data and create AI models to interpret the data.

“Mild processing has a lot of variables: so many things that interact with each other and capturing all this is difficult. This is why machine learning is such a focal point of the project. It could perhaps ultimately predict how food products will turn out before even starting the production process. In the future, it could even help us determine which crops are best suited for specific food applications," says Remko Boom.

Bridging gaps

Beyond sustainability and efficiency in plant-based food production, Remko Boom sees some of the future work in his new research group as bridging the gap between food science and data science – combining their strengths for the benefit of future sustainable food production.

“Historically, food scientists and AI researchers have operated in separate worlds. Food scientists focus on experimentation, while AI experts often work on – for example – logistical problems. With this grant we’re in these fields together, working on the same thing. And this is how we can really create something new and innovative,” he explains

And fortunately, this is something that Remko Boom is quite well versed in already. During his 26 years at Wageningen University, he chaired the Process Engineering group, which over time became quite big, with Remko at the helm. However, this also meant that he got further away from the research that he has been working on for most of his professional career.

“The group in Wageningen is very mature now, with several full professors, associate and assistant professors and so on that are leading their own exciting research. It’s really fulfilling to see, but it also means that I’m more and more on the management side of things, while I get my joy from working directly together with PhD students and postdocs on the scientific content. So, this opportunity with the RECRUIT grant is for me a great adventure, where I can really get to work again on the scientific side, and hopefully make a real difference in our food system,” says Remko Boom. “And perhaps I may add that to get to know a new environment and a new country is something I really look forward to as well.”

Remko will be stepping down as chairholder of his research group at Wageningen University, but will retain a part time position, supervising some PhD students and postdocs, and will still be involved in some research at that university as well. Having a hold on both places is a great thing overall, explains Remko Boom: “It’s sort of my personal dream, that we will become better at coming together and working together towards a more sustainable food system. I think we should not work as individual universities within Europe, but we should work together as a community and pool our resources and expertise towards our common goals. That’s another great thing about this Novo Nordisk Foundation grant and the position I’ll be stepping into – it’s an opportunity for a deep connection between groups of great researchers, all aiming to make our food production more sustainable.”