Thanks to our experience in pea breeding, the KWS Food Ingredients team can draw on existing genetic material.
Innovations
Purely plant-based
Plant-based foods are growing in popularity. So how can we at KWS use our existing knowledge and genetics to offer valuable solutions to the food industry, leading to good products to end consumers? Our Food Ingredients team is working on making this ambition a reality.
In our Food Lab, we can produce protein powder ourselves and decipher its profile.
We come across them everywhere in the supermarket: plant-based products, alternatives to ground meat, sliced cheese or cow’s milk that should nevertheless be full of flavor. That is precisely where the challenge lies – and where KWS’ Food Ingredients (KFI) team is focusing its efforts. “We’ve been monitoring the market the past few years and the rising demand for these foods is a clear and established trend,” says Nigel Moore, Head of Food Ingredients. “Entering this segment is a strategic decision for us in order to find out how we can use our core competencies – breeding and selection – to offer valuable solutions to food producers.”
The result is a dynamic, agile team that is now searching for promising variants in our material. “We started by talking with experts in the food sector and soon discovered that taste is crucial,” adds Nigel. “The products mustn’t taste too bitter, beany or sweet and they must also have the right consistency.”
“Taste is crucial“
Nigel Moore
Backed by these findings, the team began exploring the potential of our peas – because KWS has experience in breeding them, and pea protein is already a well-established ingredient in many food applications. The million-dollar question is: At the end of the day, will consumers prefer the taste of foods made with the ingredients we supply and appreciate that fewer additives are on the label?
“While we know the genetics and chemical analysis in the background, we don’t know whether our pea protein is better tasting in a real product until it’s ultimately tested in the food producer’s recipe,” explains Alexandra Molitor, Commercial Director Food Ingredients. “Our approach in the KFI team therefore differs from other KWS businesses, because our partner to find the right pea for a food product is the food industry and not KWS’ traditional customer, the farmer. In addition, agriculture and growing crops for plant protein stays an essential part in the value chain toward a plant-based food product.” The objective is therefore, to develop traits that enable our peas to be used for plant-based foods, while they show a good agricultural performance.
An important feature of foods made from pea protein is the flavor.
Searching for the right gene
At KWS, we can already fall back on a lot of genetic material for food ingredients. But which trait delivers the desired flavor? The food industry states what it desires, and our team then sets to work to turn that vision into reality. This very market-driven approach is paying off: Instead of embarking on a lengthy breeding program, the team screened existing pea material and found promising variations. An initial partnership is already off the ground with vly, a market leader in milk substitutes made from pea protein. “Investigating and utilizing existing material has made us much faster than our competitors,” says Nigel.
To build KWS expertise and become a reliable partner for the food sector, the team has set up its own Food Lab. “You can basically think of some of the tasks similar to a very specialist kitchen,” explains Karen Ilsemann, R&D Lead Food Ingredients. “Pure protein is isolated from different pea genotypes. We then dry it using a spray drying process mimicking food industry standards that we’ve established in-house to obtain protein powder. Every plant has a different protein profile translating into different functional properties and flavors. We then try to decipher which of these profiles is best suited to which food category.”
Food ingredients are a large and constantly growing market and thus offer huge commercial potential for KWS. At the same time, we are pursuing one of our most important drivers: innovation. We can keep growing as a company only by tapping new opportunities and markets. With our research in Food Ingredients, we are also contributing to our sustainability goals, promoting balanced nutrition and ensuring food security.
Present at the Plant Based World Europe trade fair (from left): Nigel Moore, Alexandra Molitor, Karl Freter, Karen Ilsemann and Sanaah Sharma Bagga
Tastes good: plant-based foods at the KWS stand for tasting
Leveraging support and knowledge
The KFI team combines a range of aspects to achieve its goals: cooperation with the food industry to identify needs, selecting the pea to deliver on such need, connecting its characteristics to the underlying genes and, of course, together with our partner, facilitating the commercial usage of ingredients from our pea lines. Knowledge, experience and advice from the whole of KWS – in many fields including, for example, research, breeding, marketing, IP and legal, logistics, procurement, and various other functions – come together to enable all of that.
“The response at this early stage is super exciting.“
Nigel Moore
“We couldn’t do it without so many of our colleagues,” says Nigel. “We’re still on a journey together where we’re always learning new things, and the wealth of existing knowledge within the company is a strong innovation platform for giving us a considerable competitive edge. We’re fishing in a completely new pond – food ingredients are a huge sector and the response and collaborations that we have from potential new customers at this early stage is already super exciting.”
You can find more about our KFI team in the Strategy Café “Nutritional Food Ingredients.”
© KWS SAAT SE & Co. KGaA 2025
