Food technology

With new raw materials as sources of food ingredients for various food formulations, many questions arise. How do we confirm the safety of the new food formulations? How to design the best achievable flavour and texture profiles? How to enrich proteins and lipids in the most sustainable means from different types of raw materials? As the food industry reacts to consumer needs, VTT’s food technology infrastructure helps to resolve the industry’s needs.

VTT’s food technology infrastructure helps you develop sustainable, functional and healthy ingredients and foods. Our R&D services focus on innovations that enable using different types of plants and side streams as food materials. The infrastructure can, for example, allow the renewal and improvement of food application and beverage processes and even find ways to add novel precision and single-cell fermentation products as key ingredients in food formulations, i.e., food production without fields or animals. 

VTT’s facilities enable research, development and innovation from laboratory to pilot scale. We can help you, for example, to diversify the raw material base by introducing cellular agriculture products into the production of meat and dairy substitutes. We may systematically optimise production conditions of new or existing food production processes. Our analytical tools enable reliable monitoring of end products' physical and chemical composition and microbiological quality. 

We help customers to utilise production side streams as efficiently as possible. Optimising your processes with us reduces costs and enhances your position in the global food market. Our solutions are built on scientifically and systemically acquired competence. 

The food technology infrastructure is located in Espoo.

Our key infrastructure:

  • Analytical laboratory 
  • Sensory laboratory 
  • Chemical analyses 
  • Physical and microstructural analyses 
  • In vitro models of digestion performance 
  • Food piloting equipment 
  • Meat and dairy alternatives piloting equipment 
  • Bakery and snack piloting equipment 
  • Bioprocessing piloting equipment 

We provide:

  • Dry and wet fractionation technologies 
  • Fermentation 
  • Sprouting 
  • Enzymatic treatment 
  • Study modelling 
  • Scale up support 
  • Research and development expert support 
  • Opportunity review 
  • Proof of concept for prototyping 
  • Predictive tools and sensing solutions 
  • Ensuring lasting product shelf-life 
  • Process safety 
  • Food extrusion 
  • Processing technologies for plant materials 
  • Modification of protein and dietary fibres 
  • Bioprocessing with enzymes and starters 
  • Microbial management 
  • Microbial strains from VTT Culture Collection 

Who is it for:

  • The food industry, all sizes of companies 
  • The society 
  • Food companies looking for a shift or disruptive change 
Want to discover more? Contact us!
Kaisu Riihinen
Kaisu Riihinen
Research Team Leader
Pekka Lehtinen
Pekka Lehtinen
Research Team Leader
HannaLeena Alakomi
Hanna-Leena Alakomi
Research Team Leader
Jukka Vainionpää
Jukka Vainionpää
Customer Account Lead