Consumers at the core of fermented food innovation

Published: Sep 24, 2025 by FME Lab

Yesterday on September 23rd, about 100 participants from academia, industry, NGOs and policy makers across Europe had joined the second Stakeholder Forum of Horizon Europe #DominoEU project. Four speakers Pr. Jutta Roosen from the Technical Universty of Munich, Dr. Emmanuella Magriplis associate professor from the Agricultural University of Athens, Dr. Michail Syrpas associate professor at Kaunas University of Technology in Lithuania and Dr. Nikoletta Vidra Science Manager at Yakult Europe altogether spotlighted the central role of consumer research in advancing the field of fermented foods.

It was also the first presentations of the research in this field conducted within #DominoEU project and #Pimento ca20128 that showed how consumers, across European areas, show various profiles towards fermented food consumption and their subjective/objective knowledge of microbes performing the fermentation process. The results also highlight various behavior of consumers towards healthy or sustainable goals when these are associated with fermented food. A special thanks to the speakers and to the participants for the fruitful discussion.

cFMD workshop in Trento

Last February 23-24th 2026, at University of Trento, a workshop was organized by the CIBIO (Nicola Segata’s lab) for #DominoEU partners. The workshop aimed at learning to query & analyse data from the Curated Food Microbiome Database (cFMD). Thanks to the very efficient and skilled teaching team (vitor Heidrich, Hrituraj Dey, Francesco aniscar, Sergio Andrés Castañeda Garzon) and for the incredible hospitality of Frederica Pinto and Nicola Segata.

From food spontaneous fermentations to food designed consortia

Our new article entitled “Microbiome metabolic modeling as a tool for innovation in fermented foods” has been published in in Current Opinion of Food Science¹.

Elham Karimi, Julien Tap, Marie-Christine Champomier-Vergès, Stéphane Chaillou. Microbiome metabolic modeling as a tool for innovation in fermented foods. Current Opinion of Food Science. 2025 ↩

The FME lab communicates about the links between the microbiome, nutrition and health.

On Thursday 27 November, the FME lab took part in the Food System Microbiomes Conference in Wageningen during the session dedicated to the connections between microbiomes, nutrition and health. The session was co-chaired by Stéphane Chaillou (INRAE, Micalis) and Prof. Christophe Courtin (KU Leuven), and provided an opportunity to showcase advances from two major European projects: DOMINO and HealthFerm.