What happens when malt expertise meets chef-led fermentation?
Soufflet Malt and Eat The Truth are working together on a new generation of flavour solutions built from cereals, fermentation and real culinary thinking.
The first projects are already clear: chocolate applications and alcohol-free amber drinks, in territories inspired by whisky and rum. Initial commercial applications are planned from 2027.
Why this partnership
Food and beverage teams are being asked to solve several things at once. Better labels. Distinctive taste. Cost control. Reliable supply. Industrial repeatability. Usually, improving one part makes another part harder.
A prototype can taste great in a kitchen and disappear after heat treatment. A cleaner label can leave a product thinner. A promising ingredient can simply be too difficult or too expensive to run on a scale.
So, we wanted to connect the work earlier: ingredient, flavour, application, and industrial reality in the same conversation.
Two very different kinds of expertise
Soufflet Malt brings deep cereal and malting knowledge, fermentation experience and industrial scale. The company operates 35 malthouses in 20 countries, with around 3.6 million tonnes of annual malt production capacity.
Eat The Truth brings the other end of the chain: chefs, solid-state fermentation, flavour creation, sensory work and application development.
One side knows cereals on a huge scale. The other keeps asking the annoying kitchen question: yes, but does it actually taste good in the final product? We need both.
More than replacing an ingredient
A lot of reformulation briefs start with replacement. What can replace cocoa? What can reduce exposure to a volatile raw material? What can simplify the label? Useful questions, but quite narrow.
Fermented cereals can also open new flavour spaces. Roasted, malty, cocoa-like, coffee, umami, kokumi. Sometimes the answer is a replacement. Sometimes it is a profile that did not exist in that format before.
That is the most interesting part for us: design the eating or drinking experience first, then build the ingredient solution around it.
From the first tasting to the factory
The partnership is set up to cover flavour creation, sensory validation, prototyping, and industrialization.
That sounds obvious. In practice, these steps are often split between different teams and happen too late. We would rather test the real matrix early – chocolate, sauce, drink, whatever it is – and see what heat, fat, sugar, acidity, storage and processing do to the flavour before everyone falls in love with a bench sample.
Scale is not the last box to tick. It changes the flavour, so it must be part of the brief from the start.
The bigger idea
Malt has a much wider future than its historical uses. Together, we want to explore what cereal fermentation can do across food and beverages, with more applications to come.
The ambition is simple to say and hard to do: real culinary depth, recognizable ingredients, and products that still make sense when you manufacture them by the ton.
That is the work.
