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Malt producer Soufflet Malt has entered into a partnership with food technology company Eat the Truth to expand grain-based fermentation across industrial food and beverage formulations.
The collaborative initiative focuses initially on cocoa applications and non-alcoholic beverages, pairing Soufflet Malt's malting and large-scale industrial manufacturing capabilities with Eat the Truth's proprietary solid-state fermentation technology and culinary research.
The venture is designed to provide commercial food and drink processors with clean, food-grade flavour solutions that mitigate ongoing supply volatility and rising procurement costs across agricultural commodities, including cocoa.
Fermentation and Flavour Creation
The development programme utilises malted grains alongside solid-state fermentation to generate complex flavour-building blocks without relying on artificial flavouring compounds.
By optimising microbiological fermentation cycles over grain substrates, the platform is engineered to yield diverse flavour notes for commercial formulation:
🍫 Cocoa Notes: Recreates rich chocolate profiles to help manufacturers manage cocoa bean price fluctuations and supply deficits.
☕ Coffee Profiles: Yields roasted and deep brewed notes for beverage and confectionery applications.
🌰 Roasted Elements: Delivers warm, toasted grain flavours suitable for morning goods and bakery systems.
🍄 Umami and Kokumi: Generates savoury depth, fullness, and prolonged mouthfeel across sauces, savoury snacks, and prepared meals.
The partnership focuses on delivering natural, clean-label alternatives to conventional synthetic flavouring additives while maintaining processing stability, yield consistency, and batch-to-batch predictability on high-throughput factory lines.
Laurent Debande, Chief Growth and Innovation Officer at Soufflet Malt, stated that the initiative directly aligns with the company's MALTiply 2030 strategy, which aims to accelerate commercial expansion into adjacent value-added ingredient markets while developing functional solutions for global food and beverage processors.
Industrial Footprint and Rapid Prototyping
A primary objective of the alliance is to bridge the gap between pilot-stage food science and global commercial manufacturing.
Soufflet Malt operates 35 malthouses across 20 countries, delivering an annual production capacity of approximately 3.6 million tonnes of malt. Eat the Truth contributes specialised expertise in fungal and microbial solid-state fermentation, flavour extraction, and culinary application design, supported by a partner network across Europe.
Together, the companies are establishing an integrated commercial pathway designed to take formulations from initial sensory discovery to high-volume commercial production:
Flavour Design and Screening: Rapid identification and sensory isolation of desired aromatic and taste compounds.
Culinary Prototyping: Benchtop application testing across chocolate confectionery, baked goods, sauces, and functional beverages.
Sensory Validation: Rigorous technical profiling to match target organoleptic properties against conventional benchmark ingredients.
Industrial Scaling: High-volume processing conducted across Soufflet Malt's global processing estate to ensure commercial volume availability.
Yair Yosefi, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Eat the Truth, stated that the collaboration establishes a new benchmark for food ingredients, delivering innovative and honest solutions designed from inception for industrial-scale manufacturing. Yosefi noted that uniting the two organisations' capabilities allows manufacturers to explore alternatives to traditional flavours while achieving clear gains in taste performance, clean-label positioning, and raw material cost control.
