Clean-label enzymes overview
- Enzymes enable clean-label functionality without remaining in finished products
- Food manufacturers use enzymes across dairy, baking and beverages
- Enzymes can improve texture and sweetness without additives
- GLP-1 trends are increasingly influencing enzyme development priorities
- Development timelines and scale-up costs can limit enzyme adoption
Clean label food is in strong demand. As the backlash against ultra-processed foods grows, and transparency is increasingly desired, consumers want products with clear, easily identifiable ingredients.
Yet manufacturers often need additives: to provide functionalities, to extend shelf-life, to add nutrients and improve taste and texture.
Enzymes can provide many of these things without additives. Unlike additives, they can be used in a product without preventing it from being clean label.
What are enzymes?
Enzymes are essentially biological catalysts, which speed up biochemical reactions in living organisms.
They can be commercially useful in food, as they can be used in a wide range of commercially important processes.
In the 20th century, enzymes began to be isolated from living cells, explains the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). This led to their wider application in the food sector.
Most enzymes used in food production are obtained through fermentation with microorganisms, according to EFSA.
They perform a wide range of functionalities within food, including breaking down cell walls in fruits to extract juices, and converting starch into sugars during alcohol production.
In food, they are used prominently in dairy and bakery, explains Ronan Moloney, vice president of enzymes at food ingredients company Kerry Group.
A clean label solution?
Enzymes are processing aids, not additives, explains Gary Tucker, technical development ambassador at consultancy Campden BRI. They are often destroyed or removed during production and do not play a role in the final product. In baking, for example, the high temperatures used can destroy the enzyme.
This, he explains, means that the enzyme does not need to be included on the ingredient list. While enzymes can achieve many of the functionalities of additives, their absence from the final product means that said product can often be clean label.
This is not always the case, explains Dr Marc Struhalla, vice president of RD&A enzymes and biotechnology at Kerry Group. If it remains in the finished product, and particularly if it has a purpose in said product, it will remain on the ingredients list.
Nevertheless, their potential for clean label products can be extremely useful for manufacturers.
Responding to trends
The use of enzymes can help food companies respond to trends, says Moloney.
For example, enzymes can improve the texture of high-protein dairy drinks. A high quantity of protein can make these drinks very viscous, explains Moloney: enzymes can help to mitigate this. An enzyme can break down some of the protein structures within the drink, so that while none of it is actually removed from the liquid, meaning that the product is still high protein, the texture itself becomes less viscous.
Enzymes can even be multi-purpose, helping to improve a product’s better-for-you and clean label credentials at the same time as making it more suitable for those with intolerances, says Moloney.
For example, an enzyme can break apart lactose in milk into two simple sugars. Firstly, this makes the product lactose-free. Secondly, because the resulting two sugars are sweeter than lactose, the product itself is sweeter, despite the fact its nutritional value has not changed. This can help manufacturers avoid adding artificial sweeteners to milk, therefore keeping it clean label.
Enzymes can reduce the need for added sugar in baking as well, according to Campden BRI’s Tucker, creating fermentable sugars to control yeast activity in bread dough.
Kerry is also exploring ways of using enzymes to convert the sugars already in products into fibres, explains Moloney. This would save formulators from adding fibre to products.
Responding to short-term trends with enzymes can sometimes be difficult. The timeline to develop a new enzyme and bring it to commercial scale can range from a year to five years, Moloney explains. This means that there is some caution in responding to trends. “We normally don’t overreact to small customer issues, trends or fads,” says Moloney. Yet GLP-1s, like high protein, better-for-you and clean label, have become too large to ignore, affecting not just their users but many consumers beyond that.
“GLP-1s are the instigator of some of the consumer behaviour, but you don’t have to be on GLP-1 drugs to follow that behaviour.”
The GLP-1 boom is affecting the development of enzymes. Kerry is spending a lot of time on enzymes that can help formulate products that GLP-1 users demand, such as nutrient-dense products and those with higher protein and fibre.
Producing enzymes
Kerry’s enzymes are produced through precision fermentation, according to Struhalla, in the sense that the company uses genetically modified organisms to produce its enzymes, which are taught “in a very precise way”.
At the Kerry Biotechnology Centre in Leipzig, where much of the early research into enzymes is conducted before they are made commercially available, the company conducts research into what enzymes they can use for what functionalities, with enzymes that have desired properties obtained through directed evolution, a laboratory method that mimics natural selection.
Following this process, these enzymes are tested at a very small scale, then tried out in the centre’s pilot plant and eventually used commercially.
“It does not make sense to develop a highly sophisticated process if they cannot run it at larger scale,” explains Mathias Salamo, team manager for R&D at the Kerry Biotechnology Centre.
In the centre’s pilot plant, the equipment is able to mimic each of the larger plants that Kerry uses to produce enzymes around the world, explains Arnd Knoll, vice president of production at the Kerry Biotechnology Centre. This means that the pilot plant can test any of the enzymes that Kerry plans to use globally.
Once the enzymes reach the pilot plant, the probability that they will then be used in large-scale production is quite high, Knoll says. If a new enzyme were to fail, the likelihood is that it would happen at an earlier stage of research and development.
“Very often this mindset of a scientist being in a lab is very much disconnected to how an engineer would look at the process,” says Knoll. The pilot plant aims to bridge these two spheres.
The costs around scale-up and implementation can be high, points out Struhalla, and the company must be aware of when it will earn back this investment through the enzymes it is producing.
While, of course, every euro invested in a project must be earned back, how long the money will remain bound up in this or that project can work as a way for the company to compare different opportunities.
Industry needs functionality
Industry needs ingredients that can give them the right functionality. From providing consumers with better-for-you products, to improving high-protein formulations, to developing foods that can appeal to GLP-1 users, the need for functionality is everywhere.
Enzymes are extremely versatile, and have the potential to provide manufacturers with all of these things without the added stigma of using additives. While production can be expensive, and producing enzymes is often time-consuming, the end result has a lot of potential.
