Improving diets and reducing waste with fermented foods

Fermented foods are integral to human diets because of their shelf-life, safety, and nutritional and health-promoting properties. Food fermentation also provides opportunities to reduce food waste and to meet global sustainable development goals. However, because these foods require microbial growth and metabolism for manufacture, there are also unique challenges for their production. Even for fermented foods like cheeses, for which industrial starter cultures are available, manufacture reliability and consistency remain major economic and scale-up issues. This talk will provide the state of the science on fermented foods and how these foods are measured and monitored. Examples of the utility of culture-independent microbial analyses using DNA sequencing for identifying and diagnosing product defects will be shared along with new directions focusing on strain-specific diversity and unique microbial metabolisms that offer opportunities for new approaches to control and fine-tune fruit and vegetable food fermentations for optimal sensory profiles and bioactive compound delivery characteristics.