Lutz Grossmann

Using science and engineering to understand, improve, and create sustainable food materials.

My group Sustainable Food Materials focuses on maintaining and improving the quality characteristics of food ingredients with increased sustainability. We envision that everyone enjoys eating healthy and sustainable foods – eating is happiness in viscoelastic structures! At the moment, we are mainly working with proteins from plant and microbial sources. We aim to:

1. Unleash the potential of novel protein-rich raw materials for foods, such as from microbial and fungi sources. We are working with novel single cells that have the potential to grow on non-arable land and are not competing with traditional energy resources.
2. Establish downstream processing approaches for these novel raw materials. We focus on obtaining technofunctional proteins by physical processing and understanding how downstream processing affects the protein functionality.
3. Understanding the technofunctional behavior of proteins based on molecular and physicochemical properties to obtain material-science blueprints that help to design food processes that yield desired functionality and structures.
4. Structuring proteins by processes such as extrusion processing, to produce more functional fibrous structures at lower temperatures that resemble that of meat more closely.

Please visit the homepage to learn more about the Grossmann lab: Homepage Link