Noblegen offers new vegan meat and dairy products with their plant-derived ingredients generated by euglena, a 1.6 billion year old microorganism. Hugh Williams, VP of Commercial and Corporate Strategy, explains euglena’s diverse nutritional profile and how it has the power to restore balance to the planet and to people.
And the great thing about Euglena is just how flexible it is and how many different ways that we can use it to produce vegan meat, dairy, and other food analogues.
And so, in the example of the QUORN Challenge, our prototype 1.0 is basically, we're making a dried protein concentrate from Euglena, and then we're using that to make a chicken nugget, for example. But as we get beyond that, really one thing we heard from QUORN is that texture is key. And so the next level up is an extruded product that's finely layered, what we call an intermediate moisture product that has elements of both dried Euglena and wet Euglena biomass. And we combine those together to make a product that really has a texture that's more akin to whole muscle meat. But then the really exciting thing, that's just the future science of Euglena is you Euglena, because it is a live microorganism, it actually has a muscle, it's called cell pellicle and it's the muscle that allows it to change shape and move. And my understanding is that Euglena, in the right environment, can actually essentially grow whole muscle meat. It can essentially produce whole meat that mimics the taste, texture and nutritional profile of real meat. And so I think that really is the future for us, and we're trying to get there as quickly as possible, and it's an exciting journey along the way.