A sustainable future of great smell and taste

Using fermentation, the Danish company EvodiaBio has reinvented the production of plant aromas. For a start, they are providing brewers with a more environmentally friendly way of making non-alcoholic beer taste right. The technology holds great potential for several other industries that relies on plant aromas for their products.

Today, aromas for food, perfumes, cosmetics, and cleaning products are primarily made one of two ways: Syntheticaly, using various compounds andsolvents or via direct extraction from cultivated plants. These conventional methods can have environmental implications, with somebeing resource-intensive and necessitating expansive land usage. One example is aroma from lavender, whichn requires up to 300 kilo of plant material to yield merely one kilo of monoterpenes – the aroma molecules known to provide flavour and scent in plants. Natural aromas by fermentation

In Denmark, a third, and more environmentally friendly production method, based on biotechnology is now a reality as the company EvodiaBio has reinvented natural aromas by fermentation, using yeast. The technology has been developed after years of research and enables an industrial-scale production of essential, aromatic molecules known as monoterpenes. A method that EvodiaBio plan to scale and develop for different beverages, perfumes, and a range of other segments using plant aromas.

Non-alcoholic beer is the first segment that EvodiaBio has addressed, as getting the taste of the beer right has been a major challenge for the brewing industry. EvodiaBio’s monoterpenoid aromas are produced using yeast cells that secrete the individual aroma components. These are then blended to replicate the aromatic profiles of various hops used in beer brewing. The result is a natural, pure, and sustainable product, enhancing the taste of non-alcoholic beer.

From 3.000 to just 1 litre of water

The natural aromas produced through fermentation can partly replace the need for harvested aromatic compounds. This enables a cost-effective and sustainable biotechnological production of aroma molecules without depleting scarce resources. Aroma hops used for non-alcoholic beer are typically purchased in the United States, where nearly 3,000 litres of water are used to grow 1 kg of aroma hops. To get the same aroma potential, EvodiaBio uses 1 litre of water while also reducing the carbon foot-print with more than 90% compared to the conventional production.