New Genomic Techniques applied to food cultures: a powerful contribution to innovative, safe, and sustainable food products.

Nontransgenic New Genomic Techniques (NGTs) have emerged as a promising tool for food industries, allowing food cultures to contribute to an innovative, safe, and more sustainable food system. NGTs have the potential to be applied to microorganisms, delivering on challenging performance traits like texture, flavour, and an increase of nutritional value. This paper brings insights on how nontransgenic NGTs applied to food cultures could be beneficial to the sector, enabling food industries to generate innovative, safe, and sustainable products for European consumers.

Non-Saccharomyces yeasts for beer production: Insights into safety aspects and considerations.

The application of non-Saccharomyces yeasts in beer as a natural tool for innovation, to create different aroma profiles and flavoured non-alcoholic beers, has attracted great interest from both researchers and commercial brewers. As a result, a higher diversity of non-Saccharomyces yeasts for beer production is expected on the market in the coming years. However, the safe use of non-Saccharomyces yeasts has not been broadly investigated and no guidance for the safety assessment of yeasts is published.

The forgotten role of food cultures.

Fermentation is one of if not the oldest food processing technique, yet it is still an emerging field when it comes to its numerous mechanisms of action and potential applications. The effect of microbial activity on the taste, bioavailability and preservation of the nutrients and the different food matrices has been deciphered by the insights of molecular microbiology. Among those roles of fermentation in the food chain, biopreservation remains the one most debated.

Regulatory and Safety Requirements for Food Cultures.

The increased use of food cultures to ferment perishable raw materials has potentiated the need for regulations to assess and assure the safety of food cultures and their uses. These regulations differ from country to country, all aimed at assuring the safe use of food cultures which has to be guaranteed by the food culture supplier. Here we highlight national differences in regulations and review a list of methods and methodologies to assess the safety of food cultures at strain level, at production, and in the final product.

Food fermentations: microorganisms with technological beneficial use.

Microbial food cultures have directly or indirectly come under various regulatory frameworks in the course of the last decades. Several of those regulatory frameworks put emphasis on "the history of use", "traditional food", or "general recognition of safety". Authoritative lists of microorganisms with a documented use in food have therefore come into high demand.