Food partnership creates acrylamide-reducing yeast

Due to the growing body of evidence of its role as a potential carcinogen, acrylamide is fast becoming a big concern for the food industry.

Acryleast™ is a new fully non-GMO solution for acrylamide reduction brought to market from today by Kerry, in partnership with Renaissance BioScience. It is a clean-label, non-GMO yeast, rich in asparaginase enzyme, which has the ability to reduce acrylamide levels by up to 90 per cent across a broad range of food and beverage products, including biscuits, crackers, French fries, potato crisps, coffee and infant food.

Governments are starting to pay attention to acrylamide and are implementing new regulations, which include setting benchmark levels (European Union) and requiring warning signs placed on foods and beverages that contain acrylamide (California Proposition 65.)

Commenting on the launch, Matthew May, Kerry’s bakery lead for Europe and Russia said, “Across our entire taste and nutrition portfolio, we are keen to ensure that the functionality of our ingredients is reliable and consistent. On this basis, we repeatedly tested Acryleast’s effectiveness in reducing acrylamide levels across a range of biscuit and cracker applications. This involved testing in both our own laboratories and in scaled-up plant trials, where reductions of greater than 90 per cent were achieved. Importantly, these trials also demonstrated no impact on taste or texture, confirming that Acryleast is a very effective and versatile solution for acrylamide reduction, that requires no or minimal changes to existing manufacturing processes.“

Dr. Cormac O’Cleirigh, chief business development officer at Renaissance BioScience Corp comments, “For customers looking for peace of mind and a more natural, non-GMO, sustainable solution to a naturally occurring problem, Acryleast is the perfect natural and clean-label solution.”

Kerry has initially focused Acryleast application analysis in the categories of baked goods, however this is being expanded to snacks, processed potatoes and other categories, as the market for non-GMO acrylamide reduction solutions continues to gain traction.