AI4NaturalFood

Sustainable Food Processing using Artificial Intelligence

Project Overview

Direct use of the native structure of plant raw materials for our foods can provide large savings of GHG emissions (> 70%) and water, while doubling the final amount of food produced. It also enables a diet with more natural fibre without having to use additives.

Currently, plant ingredients are refined to almost molecular purity - and then combined again to create structured foods. This isolation is resource intensive, and the removal of fibre and micronutrients compromises the nutritional value. The original structure in plant seeds resembles the structure of foods; so why not retain the structures that nature already provides? Retaining these native structures however makes formulation of foods very complex, as many mechanisms interact at the same time. To enable mild processing of natural ingredients whilst directly using the plant’s native structures, we will model these complex interactions using data-driven approaches with a sufficiently expressive class of models.

Project Members