Development of plant-based milk beverages with improved functionality for enhancing economic value of Vietnamese crops and healthy lives

Summary

Plant-based milks are nutritional and functional beverages serving variate type of consumers, i.e. health-conscious, lactose intolerant or consumers with cow’s milk allergies, vegetarians, or populations with limited access to cow’s milk. Although plant-based milks are being exploited, they face issues regarding processing/stability/preservation/palatability/nutritional balance. Research efforts are needed to solve these pending issues.
Taking up the knowledge from our SI 2020 project on soybean-based products, in this project, we envisage to diversify and increase the nutritional quality of the Vietnamese (VN) people’ diet by developing plant-base milks and their fermented products using traditional/underutilized VN crops. We desire to promote VN crops and ensure prosperity in the region by valorizing local products. We envisage to perform high level research encouraging VN staff/students to work on VN crops promoting regional development and return/stay in their home country. 
The work includes screening plant materials (mung bean, cashew nuts, lotus nuts, peanuts, and sweet corn) to produce plant-base milks. Production optimization, stability  improvement and palatability will be addressed. We will characterize and optimize the growth of the most promising lactic acid strains selected in SI 2020 for plant-based milk fermentation, which will facilitate the development of commercial starter culture prototypes. We aim to extract bioactive compounds from waste streams of plant-based milk production. The technologies developed will be transferred to VN food companies (GMNC., JSC, ALL Origin Vietnam., JSC, Kasa, Ruong Ruoi) for commercialization.
The project is aligned with VN national policies and UN SDGs: SDGs1, 2, 3, 9 13 (utilizing agricultural materials); SDG4 (developing educational materials, and increasing staff/students’ knowledge and skills); SDG5 (empowering and promoting woman careers); SDG17 (joint implementation of the project together with stakeholders). 

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