Expert interviews identified effort, employee motivation and sales figures as key factors that obstruct the implementation of the DGE quality standard in university canteens. The implementation of the DGE quality standard requires explicit change management, which would be facilitated by simplifications.
Cultivated meat, along with plant-based and insect-based alternatives, as well as proteins and biomass derived from fermentation processes, is considered a potentially sustainable alternative to conventional meat production. This review provides an overview of the concept of cultivated meat production and explains what efforts are currently being made in research and development to establish it as a sustainable and healthy food. The focus is on the current (bio)technological challenges, especially in production. To produce a structured product that resembles animal tissue, the growth of cells on suitable edible and biocompatible scaffold matrices is a prerequisite. In addition to this approach, there are also non-scaffold based methods such as 3D-bioprinting. Regardless of the method chosen, however, scaling up the growth and differentiation processes is crucial to increase the efficiency of the entire process. This article provides an overview of the current state of the art and derives approaches for future research projects, taking sustainability aspects into account.
Research on plant-based proteins is still in its early stages. The effects of manufacturing processes on their chemical composition (nutritive and potentially 'anti-nutritive' components), on their techno-functional and on their sensory properties are not yet fully understood. Additionally, the influence of different processing levels on the nutritional quality remains unclear, as does the question of whether plant proteins are truly more sustainable than conventional animal proteins. Within the NewFoodSystems Innovation Space, three projects aim to shed light on these questions: 'Sustainable protein ingredients', 'AlProPlant' and 'Pr:Ins-Holistic assessment'. Findings of these projects are presented in this article.
The demand for plant-based nutrition is increasing in public catering and is particularly high in campus catering and gastronomy. Based on recipes from the Studentenwerk Schleswig-Holstein's (student services organization) lunch menu, the protein quality was calculated using the Digestible Indispensable Amino Acid Score (DIAAS) for 46 vegan, 11 vegetarian and 9 meat-containing dishes, taking into account ileal digestibility coefficients from the literature. About half of the vegan dishes were of low protein quality (DIAAS < 75). This was due to a lack of intake of lysine from grain products or of sulfur-containing amino acids from legumes when these were the first protein-providing ingredient and were not adequately complemented. For this reason, when planning vegan dishes it is recommended to focus on ingredients with a high lysine content and also a high ileal digestibility of the lysine.
