Food is a problem: one of the world’s biggest, most intractable, most global and local at once. Much is produced poorly, much is wasted, too much gets to some and too little to others. Industrialised societies specifically have both a surfeit of choice and a dearth of diversity, with consequences for land, people, health, and flavour. Alongside the larger social, political, and economic changes that are needed to redesign the food system, we see sustainable food innovation offering a supplementary way to address these enmeshed problems of waste, unequal access, undernutrition, diminishing diversity, and blandness.

To develop this offering, we use culinary research and development to make flavourful sustainable foods, natural sciences to study how they work, and social sciences to explore how they can contribute to food culture. Through this union of innovation, interdisciplinary research, and open knowledge-sharing, we work for a food system that is more sustainable, equitable, and transparent, offering foods that are more diverse, nourishing, and delicious.

We pursue flavour because we observe how deliciousness and pleasure, far from being frivolous afterthoughts or luxuries available only to the few, are key determinants of food acceptance, and thus of the dietary green transition’s success. A food may be the most sustainable by any metric, but if people don’t find it delicious, they won’t eat it, and if they don’t eat it, its sustainability potential remains unrealised. The importance of taste here is hard to overstate.

In our R&D, we have a strong focus on fermentation, upcycling of by-products, and umamification, and we seek to use a culinary approach to food innovation to enrich food traditions rather than replace them. We are interested in making additions, not substitutions—for example with plant cheese or novel misos—and envision food systems and food cultures where high-quality traditional foods and new, further diversified versions of them co-exist and support each other by fulfilling different needs.

These foods not only contribute to sustainability; they also provide novel opportunities for ground-breaking science. Novel fermentations in particular are fertile sites for studying how microbial ecology and evolution change in new environments, and how these shifts come to shape metabolism, flavour chemistry, and the taste experience. Combining laboratory microbiology, DNA sequencing, metabolomics, and sensory science, we use our culinary innovations to bring disciplines and methods together to address larger scientific questions.

While scientific research helps us better understand these foods, to understand how they might be accepted into food culture—or not—is a question for the social sciences. Using the tools of social research—ethnography, participant observation, interviews, questionnaires—we seek to understand how different people relate to different kinds of food, the microbial world, sustainability issues, and the larger social and cultural context that shapes food acceptance. We also collaborate with artists to experiment with novel ways of engaging publics around these themes, for the arts’ power to reach people on a deeper, more visceral level.

Through this combined culinary, scientific, and cultural work, we seek to knit these worlds even closer together, to explore and cultivate the connections between flavour, sustainability, and biocultural diversity. With this aim, we develop products not only as practical solutions or scientific model systems, but also to help us better understand and reframe the problem itself—encouraging thinking about edibility, food diversity, and flavour in more complex, just, ecologically resonant ways.