Pictures: NOVOLYZE (Solutions SurroNov®, NOVOLYZE logo and FoodSafetyGuardian®)
Novolyze is a Food Safety company. They offer solutions to help the food industry manufacture safer food, while ensuring strong compliance with international Food Safety & Quality standards. Their research mainly focuses on evaluating the inactivation of foodborne pathogens under different kinds of stress (heat, etc.). Based on this expertise, they have developed the first range of dried, ready-to-use surrogate bacteria, an innovation that allows the food industry to test the efficacy of microbial kill steps / intervention steps in real-life conditions. Novolyze is one of the small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) involved with the PROTEIN2FOOD project. Here is a short interview with the Scientific Director at Novolyze, Pablo Alvarez.
- Tell us a bit about your business and the role you have in relation to the PROTEIN2FOOD project.
Novolyze is a Food Safety company. We offer solutions to help the food industry manufacture safer food, while ensuring strong compliance with international Food Safety & Quality standards. Our research work mainly focuses on evaluating the inactivation of foodborne pathogens under different kinds of stress (heat, etc.). Based on this expertise, we have developed the first range of dried, ready-to-use surrogate bacteria, an innovation that allows the food industry to test the efficacy of microbial kill steps / intervention steps in real-life conditions.
Our role in the PROTEIN2FOOD project is to is to ensure the microbiological quality of proteins of the future in different matrices. In order to achieve this objective Novolyze activities can be summarized in 3 different axes: microbiological analysis of the raw material, intermediate and final products developed by the different project partners; recherche of specific protein-based surrogates and HACCP assessment of the plant-based production workflows.
- How has being part of PROTIEN2FOOD benefitted your business? (knowledge, relationships, employment etc.)
Being part of PROTEIN2FOOD has allow us to better understand the plant-based market and product related, in addition PROTEIN2FOOD project is being a great network place.
- In your opinion, what has been the greatest achievements of PROTEIN2FOOD so far?
Coordinate 18 partners from with so many different backgrounds and coming from 3 different continents is already a great achievement. In addition, new products, at least prototypes have been developed, with in my opinion a high market potential.
- Once the project has ended, how will you bring your learnings from PROTEIN2FOOD into your future work?
I think that we will use our plant-based product learnings to better address the food safety of this products and therefore our potential customers.