Future sustainable feed ingredients from fungi

Offentlig prosjektsammendrag

One of the greatest challenges facing humanity is how to produce enough healthy and delicious foods meanwhile reducing the impact of food production on the environment. The high environmental footprint (CO2, land and water use) of animal production means that finding new, high quality and scalable protein sources with reduced impact is of paramount importance. Proteins from fungal biomass offer one such solution. This project is design to create new knowledge, approaches and technologies to upscale the production of protein rich fungal biomass for the aquaculture industry. As fungi are the earth great recyclers, our R&D uncovers novel ways to upcycle process industry byproducts to grow fungal biomass on large-scale, to produce a cost-competitive fishfeed ingredient . The R&D efforts will establish baseline information for the upscaling of our protein-rich biomass towards commercialization. The societal benefits of our R&D relate to new food and feed applications towards a more resilient sustainable and self-sufficient food system for our region by reducing the CO2, land and water needs in order to produce protein sources as novel food or feed ingredients to replace unsustainable sources of today, such as soy. Future outcomes to be realized include new proteins for the aquaculture industry and new meat-like food products that meat consumers demands for new products with better texture, flavor, prices and a small ingredient label than existing options. Better for people and the planet.