The diversity of end uses for legumes

Increased awareness of the need to transition to sustainable food systems is revitalizing legume consumption in Europe, leading to a compilation of innovations and initiatives that aim to put legumes as a foundation for this transition. This webinar summarizes initiatives that aim to enable the comeback of legumes and their placement in a diversity of end uses, enabling them to become more prominent in human diets and animal feeds.

Register here.

To be recorded and posted here soon after the event.

Provisional programme: 10am CET Start (for 2.5 hours)

Introduced by Marta Vasconcelos. (Researcher, Universidade Católica Portuguesa)

20' Marie-Benoit Malgrini ( Scientist in Economics at INRAE). An overview of legume uses and trends in food

10' Kathleen Zocher  . Legume processing - an overview

10' Benjamin Voiry.  Investments in pea nd faba bean protein isolate

70' Legumes in foods: multiple benefits and practical examples

40' Legumes in feeds: multiple benefits and practical examples

5' Marta Vasconcelos - Conclusions and introduction to the next event.

Presentation summaries as follows:

Full event description and Summary or Abstracts of presentations.:

Increased awareness of the need to transition to sustainable food systems is revitalizing legume consumption in Europe, leading to a compilation of innovations and initiatives that aim to put legumes as a foundation for this transition. However, many factors led to the exclusion of legumes from consumers diets in the past, including: a low environmental awareness; 2. a sub valorization of legume´s health/nutritional benefits; 3. legume´s long cooking and/or preparation time; 4. their potential secondary effects. Strategically, the food industry has been orienting its activity in order to tackle these consumer obstacles and reflect contemporary dietary trends (e.g. flexitarian, vegetarian, “gluten-free”) in their innovation portfolios, increasing the delivery of legumes and legume-based ingredients. This has led to the development of healthier and more sustainable legume based-food products at an unprecedented scale. Legumes have been reinvented into drinks, cereal bars, breads, meat replacers, snacks, flours, etc., which often combine traditional foods ‘with a spin’, incorporating new legume technological knowledge in food product innovation. Also, for several years, efforts have been made to showcase the health benefits of legumes. Results suggest that consuming even only 80-100 g per day may be enough to maintain overall health, improve gut microbiota, and even help prevent cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, obesity or cancer. This webinar summarizes initiatives that aim to enable the comeback of legumes and their placement in a diversity of end uses, enabling them to become more prominent in human diets and animal feeds. It will focus on innovation for consumers and citizens, exploring the European food and feed system and showcasing developments in academic and industrial R&D. It will demonstrate how innovations through the network are linking farmers through markets to the consumer. It will also highlight how legume breeding efforts should be mindful of providing local adaptation to legumes, but also introducing other added values (for example in specific nutrients, non-nutrients and health promoting compounds) which may increase even further the ´legume-appeal´ to European consumers.

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Title: Processing legumes in the EU - Kathleen Zocher - Institute for Food and Environmental Research (ILU)

Since the main criteria for farmers to grow legumes are price and existing markets, it is essential to widen the product portfolio to assure the future of an augmented legume cultivation by expanding and diversifying the markets. This requires improved technological processes in the food sector. To establish a status quo in this respect, as part of the LegValue project, the ILU presented techniques that are currently used in the processing of legumes within the food sector as well as a comparison of different approaches on that field in the EU. When using legumes in human nutrition, it is essential to consider nutritional and toxicological aspects. In the traditional processing for legume-based food preparation, all steps are carried out to ensure that produced food is ultimately digestible for the human organism, i.e., largely free of anti-nutritional factors (ANF). And even today, through modern procedures, the original physical processes but also biotechnological processes are used to achieve just that: A digestible and nutrition-rich food for humans.

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Title : The importance of child-tailored legume-based products in the adoption of sustainable diets - Carla S. Santos - Catholic University of Portugal

Several factors influence children’s diets. These are important since most of the food habits established during childhood and adolescence tend to persist into adulthood. Hence, when promoting a general dietary shift, children’s and adolescent’s food perceptions cannot be overlooked. In this work, three food legume-based products were designed taking into consideration their taste and viability, but also their adaptability to the family’s routine. Specifically, we developed a sweet pancake lentil flour mix, ready to use; a fava bean-based donut, with additional health-related food ingredients; and a lupin-enriched yogurt, with several pre- and probiotic advantages. Using this knowledge and collecting simple recipes from different European countries, a legume cookbook for children was also developed.

Legumes’ consumption, being an essential part of the recommended healthy and sustainable diet, has been correlated with lower incidence of allergies and asthma in children in several research studies. While food technology and research are investing on this matter, will this be enough to impact children’s (and parents) decisions towards healthy eating habits?

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Title: Potential of grain legumes to substitute rapeseed meal as protein source in dairy cow diets - Aila Vanhatalo and Kaisa Kuoppala - Department of Agricultural Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland

Grain legumes such as faba bean and lupin are interesting alternatives as protein sources to rapeseed meal in dairy cow diets owing to their N fixation ability.  A series of studies was conducted to investigate if home-grown grain legumes can replace rapeseed meal in dairy cow diets without compromising milk production.  It was shown that substituting rapeseed meal with grain legumes often resulted in similar performance in terms of energy-corrected milk yield but milk protein yields were usually compromised.  Even when grain legumes were not as effective protein supplements as rapeseed meal their use in dairy cow rations can be recommended due to their other beneficial effects in crop production at farm level.

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Title: Climate Positive Spirits - Kirsty Black - Arbikie Highland  Distillery, Scotland

Summary: Legumes present an opportunity for the sustainable development of the beverage alcohol industry.  As a low carbon footprint raw material they offer a greener alternative to traditional cereal crops whilst also generating a protein rich co-product that has potential in both animal and human nutrition.

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Title : Life Cycle Assessment of legume-based foods - Mike Williams - Trinity College, Dublin

One of the key objectives of the TRUE project is the environmental assessment of food production pathways. Using ISO standard Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology, we have compared the environmental footprint of legume-based alternatives to wheat pasta, beef meatballs, beef burger patties and mayonnaise with their traditional counterpart. In all cases except for mayonnaise, the legume-based alternatives performed significantly better over a wide range of parameters, particularly those associated with eutrophication and global warming burdens, where savings of the order of 80 to 90% could be achieved. Scenarios for legume replacement of traditional food items have also been investigated. In the case of pea-based meatballs, if just 5% of Germany’s beef consumption could be replaced with plant-based products, then annual savings of 80Mt of CO₂e per year could be achieved, equivalent to 1% of Germany’s total CO₂e emissions. In the case of the pea/soy protein burgers, a more processed legume-based product, replacing all beef burgers consumed in UK with the plant-based alternative could reduce CO₂e emissions by up to 11Mt of CO₂e per year, or 2.4% of UK’s total, terrestrial CO₂e emissions.

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Title: The BEAN MAN – a dietary intervention on replacing red and processed meat with legume products in men -  Essi Päivärinta - University of Helsinki, Finland

The BEAN MAN dietary intervention study is a part of the multidisciplinary Leg4Life project. The project aims to increase the production and use of legumes both as animal feed and human food. Finnish men consume 760 g/wk of red meat on average, which is excessive in comparison to nutritional recommendations and EAT-Lancet commission’s Planetary Health Diet. The BEAN MAN study investigates the effects of replacing red meat with legumes on nutrient intake, food consumption, and risk factors of chronic diseases in healthy, working-age men. In autumn 2020, altogether 102 voluntary men were randomly allocated into two intervention groups for six weeks. The groups were provided with 25% of their protein intake by the study: one group was provided with 760 g of red meat per week, and the other group with 200 g/wk of red meat (providing 5% of protein intake) and legume-based products providing 20% of protein intake. Legume products were based on faba bean and pea. Before and at the end of the intervention period, blood, faecal and urine samples, as well as 4-day food records were collected to analyse changes in nutritional status, nutrient intake and biomarkers for cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes, and colon cancer.

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Title: Food product innovations with grain legumes: which products for which markets? - Global overview from MINTEL-GNPD 2010-2019 data

Marie-Benoît MAGRINI- INRAE, France

We know very little on food product innovations with pulses or soya on markets, and especially in Europe. The Mintel Global New Food Database was used to identify all new food product innovations, launched between January 2010 and January 2020 in the world, that contain pulses and soya, in order to compare the market dynamics of these two main groups of legume species.

We categorized them according to their market positions and identified the species used in the ingredients. To do so, original methods based on automatic language processing were developed. Overall, the food product innovations containing soya are 4 times much more numerous than ones containing pulses at global scale, and 2 times much more important at European scale. The main pulses more and more used in food innovations are respectively chickpeas, lentils and peas in Europe. Their use as fractionated ingredients is very small compared to soya market. Many claims are associated with these food innovation products with rising interest in environmental sustainability and health compared to the claims observed on American market. Market position towards meat-less foods is not so much used by pulses compared with soya, but it increased over last years. For both, the bakery sector remains a strategic market. We noted also differences between countries and, finally, a low diversity of pulses species used.

The fact that most of the new products currently released onto the European market which contain legume ingredients tend to be with soya, confirms a strong path dependency: crops having benefited from higher investments by the past are currently more and more developed and gained more market shares. Only a strong public policy could reverse lock-in reinforcement that hampers higher legumes diversification.

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Title: Why We Choose Beans!? - Elisete Varandas - University of Porto, Portugal

Eurest Portugal is a catering company by Compass Group, which operates in Portugal for more than 40 years.
As a market leader, we believe that the impact we have on our Partners, Customers and Clients must be guided by a high degree of social responsibility, sustainability and environmental awareness.
We have developed new concepts, with a strong focus on Portuguese cuisine and products, believing that our investment in this behavior is fundament to achieve a balance between economic development and its social and environmental impact.
Educating our consumers on the benefits of legume is a sustainable approach by which we aim to increase the consumption of legumes in our restaurants, this is a clear global commitment with sustainability.
Our project “Choose Beans” helped to increase legume consumption frequency in our restaurants.  We established a monthly meal plan, with a daily legume grain dish and with the help of marketing actions, our team of nutritionists, show cooking sessions, recipes contests and eBooks editions we were able to increase our consumption of legumes and have a more active participation of our Teams, Clients and Consumers and better food options that fit into a more health-conscious lifestyle.

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Title : Overview of industrial extraction of pulse protein for valorization in food - Benjamin Voiry -  Europe & Global marketing manager Savoury Roquette, France

Plant protein ingredients are needed to obtained satisfying plant-based food. The extraction of protein from pulse to obtain food grade protein isolate is relatively recent and initially started in Europe. Protein isolate are incorporated into plant-based food. They enable the development of nutritious and convenient food and beverages, such as dairy alternative, meat alternative and protein enriched food.

Pea has now become a mainstream protein source used along soy and wheat. The pulse protein extraction can be characterized by important investment, obtaining of added value protein and a need to value coproducts obtained.

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Title :Legumes and institutional food services (IFS). Investigating sourcing, cooking and service in France - Hugo Fernandez-Inigo - INRAE, France

Legume consumption is low in Europe and institutional food services (IFS) such as school canteens could help to foster new eating habits. Accordingly, this study aims to investigate the use of legumes in this specific sector and to identify brakes and levers in sourcing, cooking and service processes.

In 2019, we addressed an online survey to IFS kitchens in France, the largest IFS sector in Europe. We collected 383 complete answers that revealed heterogeneous practices through clustering methods.

This first and original study shows that, even though they are not majority (16%), kitchens that have a high rate of legume use are also those with a strong sustainability profile (higher frequency of alternative dishes, local and organic products). Moreover, our analysis revealed ways to promote legumes in the IFS sector such as cooks’ training, new and adapted recipes, rethinking technical infrastructures, and make the guests more aware of the environmental and nutritional benefits of legumes.

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Title: Legumes in pasta, bakery products and as extrudates for meat like products - Martha Walter - IGV GmbH, Germany

IGV GmbH has been working in the field of product development based on legumes for about 10 years. They are a great vegan protein source readily available in Germany. They are the basis for a reduction in meat consumption by the population, as foods with a protein content similar to that of meat can be offered. Within the EU project TRUE, different product families such as pasta, meat substitutes and snacks were developed. The pea and the lentil were essential as raw materials.

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Title : How a feed manufacturer can generate added value with pulses: seed selection and combination, technological processes and use patterns? - Mathieu GUILLEVIC - Valorex, France

In order to bring added value to seed legumes, VALOREX establishes a value chain through its innovations from the field to the fork. (i) Crop innovations where an incentive contractualization makes the cultivation, of specific varieties with particular technical itineraries, sustainable for the supply of seeds with a high content of nutrients of interest; (ii) Innovations in processing where the skillfully combined seeds are treated by a succession of mechanical, enzymatical and thermomechanical treatments to increase their added value thanks to the concomitant increase in the content and digestibility of the nutrients of interest; (iii) Innovations in the animal feed's chain sector where the use of these protein solutions in livestock feed, thanks to the choice of nutritional values, the right dose and the type of substitution, provide solutions to animal feed's chain sector looking for protein autonomy.

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Potential of grain legumes to substitute rapeseed meal as protein source in dairy cow diets - Aila Vanhatalo and Kaisa Kuoppala - Department of Agricultural Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland

Grain legumes such as faba bean and lupin are interesting alternatives as protein sources to rapeseed meal in dairy cow diets owing to their N fixation ability.  A series of studies was conducted to investigate if home-grown grain legumes can replace rapeseed meal in dairy cow diets without compromising milk production.  It was shown that substituting rapeseed meal with grain legumes often resulted in similar performance in terms of energy-corrected milk yield but milk protein yields were usually compromised.  Even when grain legumes were not as effective protein supplements as rapeseed meal their use in dairy cow rations can be recommended due to their other beneficial effects in crop production at farm level.

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Title: Legumes in Aquafeeds - Matthew Slater - Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI), Germany

Legumes such as Lupin, Faba Bean, Pea and Sustainably produced Soya Bean have a role to play in replacing fishmeal and other unsustainable protein sources in feeds for fish and shrimp in aquaculture (aquafeeds). The researchers at AWI have worked for the past few years on developing optimal formats and formulations of aquafeeds containing legumes. These formulations and diets are valuable for producers aiming to make fed aquaculture of salmon, shrimp of seabass more sustainable in the future.

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