Healthy snacking with chips made from mushroom residue streams

Bernadette Conrads, Joep van den Broek, Daniël van den Brand and Art Muijsenberg are all studying Health Food Innovation Management at Maastricht University. They work together to develop tasty snacks that are both healthy and sustainable. With their latest product Bitez, chips made from mushroom residues, they participated in the KickStartShow of the Dutch Food Week.

Biltong

It started for the four food innovators with a South African snack. When they brainstormed an initial idea for a healthy alternative to existing snacks, the 'biltong' came high on the list of favorites. These dried strips of meat are widely eaten in South Africa at rugby matches, barbecues, on the street and at the cinema. The students developed a vegan version of this South African biltong, made from shiitake mushrooms.

Ecotrophelia

With the "Shiitake Biltong," the four entered Ecotrophelia, a European food product development competition. The students won in the Netherlands and were then allowed to present the idea at the European finals. There they discovered that the product was not sustainable enough and the market in Europe was too small. Joep van den Broek: "We came to the conclusion that shiitake as a raw material was not such a smart choice. Good shiitake is hard to come by and you often have to import it from Asia. That is expensive and not really sustainable."

Chips

Back to the drawing board, then. Art Muijsenberg: "We wanted to do something with mushrooms again. But this time with raw materials from a Dutch waste stream. What a sustainable way to do it. Via one of the members of the jury, we came into contact with a mushroom grower who strongly believes in innovation. We entered the development kitchen with pieces of his sliced mushrooms. We came out again with a mushroom-based chip."

This chip called Bitez is produced using an innovative microwave technique resulting in a crispy and flavorful chip, packed with protein, fiber and micronutrients. "This new product is made from the residual streams of local produce. It is sustainable, healthy, plant-based, circular, and most importantly, very tasty. Our chips don't go into the fryer, so they really are a lot healthier than regular (vegetable) chips."

The first taste is again that of South African biltong. "Of course we don't know how the Dutch market is going to react to potato chips that taste. We also want to see if we can make Bitez with other flavors, obviously based on residual streams. We are convinced that there is a big market for this."

KickStartShow

Bitez was one of the products presented during the KickStartShow of the Dutch Food Week. At this event, at Brightlands Campus Greenport Venlo, ten student teams and alumni from green education pitched their innovative idea, concept or own company in the field of agrifood to a business panel. Unfortunately, the Limburg entry did not win any prizes, but the students are determined to find funding to develop their product further.

The food concepts that did win a prize were SauerCrowd (raw, fermented products full of viable microbacteria), Choc-ing-lekker (vegan fudge) and RotterVisch (a local circular initiative for fermented products). They won a nice amount of money and a coaching program for the further development of their idea, concept or own business. The incentive prize was for Bonborange. They make sustainable orange-chocolate products and help against the waste of orange peels.

Know More

All about Bitez and the biltong snack can be found at the website bitezfoods.com. You can watch the KickStartShow back via the Brightlands website.