Project
Call for Partners | FermGuard - Ensuring microbiological safety of fermented products
Fermentation is increasingly being used as technology to introduce new flavors or nutritional factors in food products or to remove undesired components. Traditional fermentations have a long history of safe use but for new fermented products, safety remains to be proven. The FermGuard project will bring science-based guidance for safe fermentation processes
Fermentation has been used for centuries for products such as yoghurt and cheese, but nowadays new types of fermented products appear on the market that lack a long history of safe use. This trend is expected to continue as fermentation is also recognized as an emerging food innovation by FAO (2025). The use of new plant proteins introduces new microbiological challenges because they may contain higher levels of microbial contaminants and starter cultures sometimes show variable, time dependent acidification patterns. A low pH in combination with the presence of undissociated acids is critical to the safety of fermented foods. For new food fermentations, the acidification pattern should therefore be better studied to ensure outgrowth of microbial contaminants is controlled during this process step.
FermGuard is a multidisciplinary project bringing together experts in food safety, fermentation and data science to develop science-based guidance for safe fermentation processes. Using high throughput data generation techniques available in the team to monitor starter culture performance and growth parameters of food pathogens allow for efficient generation of large data sets. A hybrid model that combines computational models for microbial growth and acid production will be combined with a machine learning model to help select/predict best combinations of starter culture, ingredients and fermentation conditions to ensure the safety of the product. This approach allows future integration with additional datasets from other projects on flavor production, growth prediction models of food pathogens and minimal conditions for thermal processing.
The overall outcome will provide the plant-based food industry a tool to predict optimal conditions for fermentation that result in minimal food safety risks.
Partners
For this project, we would like to connect and shape the project further with industrial partners that supply food ingredients or food cultures and end food producing companies already using fermentation or aiming to use it.