A healthy diet is important to the consumer and the demand for food with increased content of healthy ingredients is growing continuously. Bio-, health and vegan food are clearly topics with significant growth potential. Particularly with regard to the steadily rising average age of the European population and the associated altered nutritional requirements; foods with age-appropriate nutritional composition are increasingly the focus of nutrition research. Dietary fibres, plant proteins and unsaturated fatty acids are the nutrients mainly considered in the NutriAct cluster. Within the framework of the project, the Institute for Food and Environmental Research (ILU e.V.) is working on these three nutrient groups and is developing basic and intermediate products as well as marketable end products while considering future food production. In consultation with the industrial partners involved, selective milling, combined fermentation processes and extrusion are used to produce samples and to process them in selected product sample categories. The scientific insights obtained are directly integrated in product optimisation (e.g. legumes-based baking mix). Furthermore, the influence of different production and processing methods on polyphenol content and antioxidant capacity is analysed. The polyphenol content and the antioxidant capacity are determined in the original raw materials (flour mixtures), dry pasta products, cooked pasta products and in directly expanded extrudates, and compared with each other. With the Leibniz Institute of Vegetable and Ornamental Crops (IGZ) the development of highly nutritious and innovative baked goods is carried out, which are adapted to age-related nutritional requirements, through the addition of various microgreens and young plants (‘5-leaf-stage’).

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