Voice on air – PAUL HART: which will be the next plant-based protein to bet on?

The vegetable protein industry is now booming, and this brings many questions from curious consumers and small businesses who want to enter this market. We addressed some of them to Paul Hart, plant based protein consultant at Elm Lea Partner’s Ltd, trying to understand what will be the prospects for plant proteins in the near future.

 

Hi Paul, thank you very much for accepting our invitation. It is a great opportunity to have an expert like you helping us disentangle the evolving world of plant-based protein. Before we dive into the main argument, could you tell us a bit about your background and how you got involved with plant protein?

Yes, gladly. I’ve worked in the food industry over 40 years since leaving school. My background was originally in dairy science, with Unilever R&D, in the ice cream department. There I learned about dairy protein functionality, in particular emulsification. After six years I transferred to a world-class biosciences group, which had already elucidated the gelling structure of alginate, xanthan, and carrageenan, this led to a huge number of low fat and utimately zero fat spreads, which is all about controlling water structure.

Then I spent some time in Corporate affairs, and later in August 2007 joined AVEBE in the Netherlands, with their Solanic startup working on potato protein. I joined their commercial team, as international Application Technology manager, essentially deputising for the R&D director with customers. One important piece of work with them was to determine new applications for their highly nutritious, highly functional function potato protein. I worked across all sectors: nutrition, bakery, beverages, confectionery, dairy, meat, snacks, and a bit of personal care.

On occasions I also assisted their chemical and process engineers, on small process improvements. Initially, I was responsible for Sales in Southern Europe: France, Spain and Italy, through our distributors in those countries. But then, I moved on to North America, Australia etc..  Then we changed to a market managment approach, and I was responsible for nutritional beverages and gels (with potato protein), and also gluten-free bakery which was very successful.

When I was with Solanic I developed half a dozen or more completely new applications in totally  different sectors: Wine clarification, mayonnaise dressings, gluten-free bread, vegan quiches and burgers. All of them worked technically, and some were very valuable commercially.

 

What’s been your proudest achievement in the plant-based arena?

Within a month of working with Solanic, I was already in the lab making trials – for Vegan Burgers and Quiche: based on a ‘New Covent Garden’ bean soup.  A great achievement built on this was supporting Quorn’s launch of a vegan burger with potato protein, which gels like egg white.

 

How do you see the plant-based sector evolving in the future? Do you think that there will always be the “waving process” from one plant-based protein to another? Like it has happened from soy protein to peas protein, and so on…

There is a consumer driver for this. Back to gluten-free, if you drop gluten from the formulation what protein did you replace it with? Egg? – which is an allergen. Or perhaps, a dairy protein, another allergen. Again, soy, yet another allergen. So, with potato protein, I became sensitised, to the possibilities for allergen-free.

So let’s just talk about this. What happened with soy? In my experience soy is THE vegetable protein market, and has been since 1980.In 2012, pea protein didn’t hardly figure. But now, pea is the new soy. And it won’t happen again unless pea is declared allergen. I recall, In 2009, working on lupin protein, and lupin was declared an allergen. At that point, everybody who was formulating lupin wanted to reformulate with something which wasn’t an allergen…

Soy has many issues in the market. Firstly, you have to extract the oil. Historically, this was organic solvent extraction (hexane), which is problematic because people don’t wanna eat hexane! Then there is the issue with soy itself. Basically, it is an allergen and must be called out in on-pack ingredient declarations. Then we have the anti-nutritional factors It delivers Trypsin Inhibitor Activity (TIA) which binds ileal proteases and blocks protein absorption. Once producers know there might be an issue that’s hard to explain, they prefer something which needs no explanation.

But, with pea there’s no fat extraction with solvent. People think it is green garden peas, so it sounds friendly. Well, actually it isn’t, it is yellow split peas, and frequently people show the wrong green peas in their marketing! The yellow split pea protein is cream-colored, not green with chlorophyll. Most peas have anti-nutritional factors that are quite modest.

I think as we move to a cleaner label, having an allergen on the label is seen as undesirable by some producers.  Therefore, there’s a move towards ‘free from’ allergens.

Towards the end of my time with Solanic and indeed recently, no new product innovation was demanding soy, but maybe I have a unique allergen-free perspective here…!

 

Out of curiosity, could you tell us a bit about your contribution to Barclays?

Yes. Barclays investment Bank have an ingredient team advising investors and wanted to understand technical aspects of the Plant Based trend and invited me to present. In 2019, they arranged a series of FoodRevolution lunchtime workshops, firstly in Paris, then London, and Zurich (postponed). They invitied up to 2 dozen portfolio investment managers for a number of  presentations during which a Plant-Based lunch was served – like Beyond meat or an interesting plant based dessert.

At the time, Barclays was placing Beyond Meats shares in the market, and their lead Bejamin Theurer based in Mexico had just presented a bullish forecast. There was a series of 10-minute presentations from Barclays team members – then perhaps the head of Danone Dairy & Plant Based EU, a Mycoprotein company, an Insect start-up (crickets).

Then, during my 10 minutes, I defined Plant Based – which is really all about proteins – and what the challenges are between a functional and simply bulk nutritional protein. Then I compared the Impossible and Beyond formulations – indicating what the ‘clean label’ challenges were. For example, Impossible has soy GMO which can’t be sold in Europe while EFSA is considering the safety dossier on GMO leg-hemoglobin, their red colorant.

While some consumers want simple labels, Plant based tends to add complexity. Finally, I compared the nutrition of a range of Plant-Based ‘milk’ to whole dairy milk – in fact much lower total solids across the board, especially protein (1% Oatly vs 3.3%).  Non-dairy ‘milk’ should match the nutritional profile of conventional milk.