The food science playground

This story opens in the American Midwest, where food traditions and brewing run deep – and where new ideas feel surprisingly at home. From a kitchen table in the lakeland state of Wisconsin to the Finnish lake district, we follow the people crafting the future of food.

One of them is Dr. Chris Landowski, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of Onego Bio in Finland. Onego Bio is part of a new generation of food innovators using precision fermentation to create functional proteins. The process combines microbes and fermentation principles which many people already know from brewing. “Brewing eggs is like brewing beer” is more than a metaphor: it’s a shortcut to understanding why fermentation is becoming a serious tool for modern, more sustainable food production.

In Janesville, Wisconsin, we enter GEA’s New Food Application and Technology Center – or ATC for short. This is a place where processes can be tried under realistic conditions: testing equipment, learning what works and refining steps before scaling up recipes. The essential part of innovation takes place here – measuring, adjusting, repeating – until a reliable process is established which means production at scale is possible.
 
For Onego Bio, this means the industrial-scale production of the alternative egg-white protein, ovalbumin, which is indistinguishable from the one found in chicken eggs. Onego Bio’s egg-white ingredient is called Bioalbumen®. It delivers the binding properties and the light, fluffy texture in products such as baked goods, confectionery, snacks, beverages, sauces and meat alternatives. This is what progress looks like before it reaches our own dinner table.