Vegan, vegetarian, and flexitarian lifestyles are becoming increasingly popular because of growing concerns around environmental impact and animal welfare, as well as health.
As consumers seek healthier and more sustainable foods, producers face various challenges with regards to taste. Reducing or replacing ingredients to make a product healthier or more sustainable can often make it difficult to retain great taste. That’s where Ohly taste improvement solutions come in.
Improving taste with yeast-based ingredients
Like meat, cheese and ripe tomatoes, yeast extracts are rich in glutamic acid, a naturally occurring compound which brings an umami taste. Often described as the ‘fifth taste’, umami can bring out true flavours and enhance the overall taste experience of plant-based foods by imparting that savoury and deeply satisfying sensation which consumers are used to feeling when they eat meaty or cheesy foods. By using Ohly’s vegan yeast extracts, food manufacturers can deliver flavoursome and authentic tasting alternative proteins.
Create richer flavours, balance and mouthfeel with Ohly’s taste improvement solutions
Ohly provides expertise in taste improvement and supplies highly functional yeast-based ingredients to support changing market demands and create delicious vegan foods. Ohly’s range of versatile yeast extracts will highlight the existing flavour profile of food and serve as a great tool for retaining taste when removing, reducing or replacing key flavour ingredients such as salt or sugar.
As well as having their own distinctive umami flavour, yeast extracts are a very useful taste modulation tool that brings flavours to life and helps create a more authentic taste. Ohly’s yeast extracts will help you to create richer and more complex flavours, balance taste and enhance mouthfeel and juiciness.
Reduce salt content up to 50% without compromising on flavour richness
Products known to be high in salt include sauces and dressings, meat and fish, instant soups, seasonings, and ready meals. If you simply reduce the amount of salt in these foods, it has a negative impact because the salt also influences our overall perception of taste, as well as savoury flavours.
Ohly salt reduction solutions provide a complex and rich savoury taste so that your products still taste good even if you reduce the salt content up to 50%. Our products have unique salinity boosting properties that increase the perception of saltiness by enhancing flavours and boosting umami so reducing the need for sodium in a wide range of applications.’.
Effectively mask off-notes from plant-based proteins or high-intensity sweeteners
There are no ingredients to prevent off-notes entirely. However, at Ohly, we offer ingredients which can mask these unwanted off-notes. The natural, complex umami brings out true flavours and covers up unwanted flavours from functional ingredients.
Natural and label-friendly yeast extracts help to mask lingering unpleasant off-notes that can occur with alternative proteins. They work by distracting the taste buds and in addition they introduce that juicy and fatty mouthfeel that you get with meat which is often so hard to replicate.
For low-sugar food products, we’ve also developed natural, clean-tasting solutions, which restore the main flavour profile and masks any off-notes from high-intensity sweeteners.
What makes Ohly a preferred choice for food applications?
Ohly are continually working to develop new products for plant-based applications as well as playing an active part in addressing global sustainable challenges by using resources efficiently, reducing carbon emissions and providing solutions that allow our customers to reduce their carbon footprint through our products. So, they can achieve the perfect balance, creating nutritious, sustainable, and delicious meals.
We’re experts in balancing flavour and function. Our expertise comes from our 200-year history of creating high-quality yeast specialties. We’ve been leaders in yeast production for so long because we’ve always put great emphasis on research and development. From formulating carbon-neutral products to embracing technology to achieve greater efficiency and better results.
Contact our technical application experts Florian Much and Robert Laster to find out more about Ohly yeast-based ingredients for taste improvement and see which solution is the right for you.
Florian Much
Technical Service EMEA
[email protected]
Robert Laster
Technical Service North America
[email protected]
