Preparing Food for the Future: TFTAK’s 2025 in Review

As 2025 ends, we are looking back at a year defined by growth, bold flavors, smart microbes, and groundbreaking science. From optimizing the food microbiome to creating the next generation of hybrid dairy and to award-winning everyday products, TFTAK has continued to bridge the gap between rigorous science and food on your dinner table.

Here is a look at what we achieved together in 2025.

2025 full of achievements

It was a busy year for our labs and tasting rooms. Here is the statistical snapshot of our impact:

• In total, 16 scientific articles were published in high-impact journals. Our colleagues named Publication of the Year the article Fermentation by lactic acid bacteria during pea protein isolation reduces undesirable flavors and changes techno-functional properties, published in Food Chemistry, 492(1), 2025, by Aleksei Kaleda, Navratan Sharma, Kadi Jakobson, Irina Stulova, and Sirli Rosenvald.
  

• 4 PhD theses were defended by our brilliant researchers (congrats, Helen Vaikma, Anna Kattel, Bashir Bashiri, Hidde Berg, and Kärt Saarniit!) - 85% of our colleagues have a master’s degree or higher - and we value that.
  

• We had 93 R&D projects underway, 39 of which were international collaboration projects.

  
  

Our colleagues selected as Project of the Year the development of a functional mushroom drink for Liviko, Tripsy. The project was led by our Functional Food and Beverages group.

2025 Gaining and sharing knowledge

We attended more than 50 conferences and trade fairs across Europe, delivering presentations and poster sessions to strengthen our knowledge base and build bridges for future successful collaborations.

Our strongest presence was at the major food innovation event Bridge2Food, where we showcased our progress in developing Hybrid Cheese, offered tastings of our one-of-a-kind plant-based salmon fillet, and held several highly valuable meetings. Other key focus areas included events dedicated to bioprocessing, alternative proteins, microbiome research, and food innovation.

Our partners' success is our success. In 2025, number of products developed with TFTAK’s R&D support swept the awards, proving that science makes food taste better.

• Gulfood Innovation Award: Thormi’s pea protein–based ready meal Chickenless in Coconut Curry Sauce (developed with Vegestar).

• Best Non-Alcoholic Drink: Värska Magnesium (People's Favourite & Category Winner, Estonian Best Food Product Competition 2025).

• Best Value-Added Food: Mozzarella Bowl (developed with Chef Lundén, Best Estonian Food Award).

• Best Ready Meal: Tuna Bowl (developed with Chef Lundén, Best Estonian Food Award).

Looking ahead to 2026

As we prepare for 2026, we are already gearing up for the Frame Bio project, which kicks off in January. This Horizon Europe initiative’s goal is to develop multi-scale Frameworks for single cell protein production. TFTAK’s goal is to combine multi-objective optimization and metabolic modeling. That will allow us to use minimal negative effects on environment as an objective in parallel with the usual goal of maximizing product of interest.   

We are also moving forward with strengthening our co-operation with Lallemand offering technical support for Lallemand’s production units; microbial starter consortia development for fermented vegetables in the Horizon Europe–funded Domino project; the KavaTech project to develop fermentation-based extraction technology for producing high-quality legume-based proteins; enhancing the sensory properties of hybrid dairy; developing our own high-throughput strain- and metabolic-pathway-screening method that will allow us to screen 10,000× more combinations; creating successful functional foods and beverages… and much more.

To all our partners, clients, and the incredible #teamTFTAK - thank you for a delicious and innovative 2025. Let’s keep the same spirit and pace in 2026!

This year’s holiday card was designed by Kaisa from Microbiome Research Group in collaboration with AI. Many thanks!