Captivating French gastronomy with plant-based ingredients

Pauline Lebrun, Product Manager at Caldic Ingredients France, plays a key role alongside her team. When Pauline and her colleagues develop new recipes and prototype samples, they bring their expertise to the table to evaluate taste, texture, flavor, and nutritional content. Their input is essential to ensure that each innovation meets both technical expectations and consumer preferences.

For example, a classic dish like the Pasta Bolognese can have the richest sauce, the perfect bite of the pasta and vegetables, but is incomplete without the meat. The team uses texturized soy protein as a substitute for the meat, and Pauline makes sure the dish is as delectable as the original.

“Since the product is created from scratch, we must be certain that it meets customer specifications and satisfies end consumers. When using a substitute, there should be no impact on its taste, and the texture must also be similar,” she explains.

Our skilled teams continue to build an extensive portfolio to develop food solutions that are nutritious, help reduce waste, and support the transition to plant-based diets. Combining ingredients from different principal suppliers, our adept R&D team creates formulations using meat substitutes and other plant-based sources.

The suppliers we partner with often specify how the ingredients can be used. However, our team tests and tastes the end product. Varying from ‘chicken’ nuggets, ‘meaty’ burger patties, to dairy and egg-free muffins, the tasting process is arduous considering the number of parameters that must be assessed. Pauline ensures that the product samples developed by the food technologist meet commercial benchmarks and factor in local preferences.

“Since our formulations cater to the French consumer, we must consider their palate, especially with plant-based products. We don’t want a substitute to affect the overall experience of the food,” she says. If she and the team are dissatisfied, they turn to our vast portfolio of flavors, tweaking the recipe and taking into account flavor tonalities: the systematic guide to complementary ingredients.

To promote the portfolio to customers, Pauline and her team create demo kits with recipes and ingredients to demonstrate how the latter can be used in the end application. These kits also show how to incorporate the ingredients to create clean-label solutions - thereby ensuring we provide end-to-end support in improving the environmental profile of a product.