Pitch: a startup using solid-state fermentation to upcycle food industry side streams into clean-label savoury flavour ingredients.
Source: Reduced
Reduced uses solid-state fermentation to upcycle food processing side streams into flavour ingredients, clean-label alternatives to hydrolysed vegetable proteins (HVP), meat and yeast extracts.
It combines rice koji fermentation and controlled reaction processes, enabling the production of complex flavours (umami, kokumi, Maillard reaction notes) in three days.
Its current range includes mushroom, vegetable, shore crab and chicken concentrates, which are already used by food manufacturers and foodservice operators.
Reduced claims a cost-in-use advantage, with its ingredients priced at ~€0.89/kg after dilution, compared to €1.31–€1.81/kg for conventional chicken and mushroom alternatives.
Why did we select the startup?
Reduced aligns well with Symrise’s focus on flavours by delivering clean-label, “cost-effective“ savoury ingredients from low-value side streams.
The key question is how its ingredients compare to traditional solutions in terms of performance, consistency and scalability.
Why now?
The startup is entering a scale-up phase with the recent Series A funding aimed at industrialisation, portfolio expansion and larger B2B partnerships. It would be a great time to benchmark it against the competitors and establish a partnership with the most promising.
Source: Reduced