42 n FOOD AND BEVERAGE September 2025 www.drivesncontrols.com Servos help to create convincing plant-based rivals to meat The demand for products based on plant protein – particularly meat substitutes – is growing rapidly. This trend is being driven by health benefits, including high levels of fibre, vitamins and nutrients, as well as low calories and fat content. Plant-based foods also need less water and land, and generate fewer greenhouse gas emissions, making them more sustainable. But food producers face challenges in replicating the textures and flavours of traditional meat products, which makes it difficult to persuade some traditional meateaters to make the switch. Dutch Structuring Technology (DST), based in the Netherlands, is addressing this issue with innovative technologies and production techniques that aim to create more realistic plant-based meat alternatives. Current methods for processing and modifying plant proteins rely on outdated, heat-intensive extrusion technologies that were not originally developed to produce these ingredients. Many meat-replacement producers are therefore looking for the next big breakthrough. Extrusion technologies have several drawbacks, including quality fluctuations due to machine and parameter variations, high energy consumption that adds to production costs, and the degradation of ingredients caused by high pressures and temperatures. To compete with traditional meat-based foods, new plant-based alternatives must closely mimic their textures and flavours, while maintaining competitive price points, and consistent quality. DST says that its new Sheartex process delivers products that are close to a real meat-like texture. It uses plant protein and water as its main ingredients and by controlling the parameters of a continuous shearing and mixing process, tailors the conditions to obtain the required meat-like texture. The technology, co-developed with a Dutch mixing system specialist, Sobatech, is claimed to offer significant advantages over traditional methods. It uses a third of the energy of “high-moisture extrusion cooking” techniques, helping to bring costs down to a similar level to animal proteins. “Using precision control, Sheartex can create products with fibres that exhibit particular lengths and strengths, so they can more closely match the specific animal meat products they are replacing,” explains DST’s co-founder, Julian Lekner. “What is more, fats, emulsions and other wet ingredients – as well as dry ingredients such as flavours and colours – can be added during the processing stage so that they form an intrinsic part of the textured protein, removing the need for the post-processing steps required in other production methods. “Our Sheartex produces high-quality protein products – with textures ranging from salmon to beef jerky – at 1,000kg per hour, using far less energy than existing processes,” he adds. “This not only means we A Dutch developer of plant-based meat alternatives is using automation technologies including precision servomotors to create foods that closely match the meat products they designed to replace. The process uses less energy to produce convincing meat substitutes that are cheaper than rival products. DST’s Sheartex process uses precision servomotors to help produce convincing plant-based meat substitutes
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