Cheese from Peas: Maximising Use and Nutritional Value of UK Pulses for Dairy Alternatives.

Cheese from Peas focuses on physical processing of whole legume seeds driving their natural nutrients to an unparalleled high degree of functionality with zero-waste generation. It enables rapid physical transformation of starch together with protein activation to achieve a pea flour delivering the desired texture and oil binding for vegan cheeses, removing the need of synthetic emulsifiers, unsustainable tropical fats, and gelling agents.

Our technology also significantly reduces the negative beany flavour and taste typical of legume seeds, and enhances their natural colour, reducing artificial flavourings and colourings content in vegan cheese. Additionally, our technological solution is applicable to different yellow pea varieties and designed to enable rapid scale-up. Given the compositional and structural similarities across legume seeds (pea, lentils, fava bean) it is expected that our solution can be readily applied to all legumes, thus maximising its potential of applications and business growth.

The outputs include a new process (platform) for making ingredients in the form of functional flours for cheeses from pulses, benchmarking of results, early NDP trails, and validation of ingredients applications; all at laboratory scale. These will validate our technology, its application, and market fit, while simultaneously significantly improving the company profile and attractiveness for raising private investment.

The project outputs will inform the next development stage of pilot trials and prototyping of cheese applications with large potential customers. Project results will also be used in the future on other applications which we have already trialled into early laboratory-scale prototypes, enabling us to develop more products in other segments from the same ingredients' development platform.