Nutritional LCA of novel protein foods: methodological challenges and opportunities

Linked Sessions:

No items found

Poster Number:  09 

Main Presenter:    Olivier Talon 

Co-Authors:   Guillaume Bayon-Vicente     Mathieu De Rijdt      Valérie Dormal      Baptiste Leroy                              

The PROTEBoost project aims at producing alternative food products based on purple bacteria fed with agrifood industry co-products. Purple bacteria biomass is particularly promising for the food sector because it contains a large amount of proteins with an amino acids profile suitable for human consumption [1]. This project involves a sustainability evaluation through LCA to support the technological developments. The goal of LCA in this project is not only to identify hotspots and trade-offs in the production process and guide eco-design efforts, but also to compare the footprint of the developed products to that of other protein-rich food products.
Several approaches can be used to make a comparative LCA of food products. The products can be compared as such, as part of meals [2] or as part of diets [3]. The functional unit can be defined on a mass basis, on a specific nutrient content basis or refer to composite nutritional indices [4]. The “how long” component of the functional unit definition can be based on the product’s shelf life or involve more complex issues such as satiety [5].
In this contribution, we review different nutritional LCA approaches and investigate how applicable they can be for the case of a research project at intermediate TRL. The LCA model for the production of purple bacteria biomass from molasses in photobioreactors and its integration in the formulation of “bacterial burgers” is discussed. The analysis of the results reveals that the biomass is the main contributor to the calculated impacts of the burger, this contribution being mostly dominated by the energy for lighting.
The impacts of the bacterial burger and those of meat or vegetable-based burgers are compared with different selected nutritional LCA approaches. Though the overall trend is that purple bacteria-based have a strong potential to be an environmentally relevant alternative to meat and can also be competitive with vegetable alternatives, slight differences in the conclusions can be observed depending on the chosen comparison methodology.

©2026 Forum for Sustainability through Life Cycle Innovation e.V. | Contact Us | Legal Info

CONTACT US

If you would like to get in touch with us, please feel free to send us a message. Thank you very much in advance.

Sending

Log in with your credentials

or    

Forgot your details?

Create Account