Amid rising production costs, vulnerable supply chains, and other challenges facing the F&B industry, SternEnzym is presenting its full range of enzymes for crackers, biscuits, wafers, and confectionery products, addressing these issues at the ongoing ISM and ProSweets 2025. 

“We see a lot of issues with the supply chain of good raw material, especially for wafers. So these enzymes enable you to produce good wafers, even with mediocre raw materials,” Sven Konradt, head of R&D at SternEnzym, tells Food Ingredients First.

The company’s applications on the show floor include two “creative” concepts developed in an in-house lab: dark chocolate wafers filled with brownie-flavored cream or a Dubai chocolate version. The Dubai cream is inspired by viral social media trends and combines pistachio paste, kadayif (angel hair), and tahini (sesame paste). The wafers stay crispy because of a specially developed enzyme.

The company notes that food manufacturers are often challenged with uneven raw materials, such as inconsistent flour, which can interrupt production and fluctuate quality. The enzyme solutions help stabilize output and also reduce baking times.

“Whenever you have too many viscosity enhancing ingredients in the dough and would need a lot of energy to remove the water from the wafers, these enzymes help reduce viscosity, and therefore help you to evaporate water easier, saving energy and time,” Konradt explains.

Cracking down on sugar

Heightened consumer interest in nutritional footprints has spurred innovation in sugar alternatives or sugar reduction technologies. SternEnzym is presenting an enzymatic fructooligosaccharides (FOS) production process that addresses demand for healthier confectionery.

Adding FOS from sucrose also enables reducing the amount of sugar in confections without impacting taste or texture.

“‘Healthier’ is one [key] topic. We have a fructosyltransferase enzyme that produces FOS from sugar, which is prebiotics. These play right into the game of gut health-promoting ingredients. They are the food for our gut bacteria, which is an important trend that we see,” notes Konradt.

“On the other hand, we have asparaginase to prevent acrylamide formation, which is again a very high-concern risk material that you would want to prevent from occurring in your baked goods.”

Targeting costs and sustainability

The F&B sector is grappling with fluctuations in raw material availability due to political tensions, climate change, and economic pressures. Konradt says enzymatic solutions help make confectionery production more sustainable while maintaining taste and texture properties.

“There’s always a point in energy saving in production simply by evaporation of water, which becomes easier with these enzymes,” he notes, explaining how this plays out.

“If you make a wafer for your typical KitKat type of product, it has to be a maximum of 2% water in the final product to be stable for a long time and have a longer shelf life. Therefore, it needs to lose the water, which it does during baking. So if you have a low-viscosity dough, the evaporation is easier than when the water is held up by all the sugars, which you can break down with our enzymes. With our solution, this water is reduced to 2% more quickly. You really need the enzymes to make wafers with lower-quality flours.”

“On the other hand, they also prolong shelf life, reducing food waste. You have things that are consistent for longer times on the shelf, and consumers will be able to consume them longer with all the texture and taste attributes they want.”

The company’s solutions range from cellulases and hemicellulases for viscosity reduction to acrylamide prevention and invertase for the prolonged shelf life of soft fillings. In addition to making production more energy-efficient, they can also help reduce the use of additives.

“You can also prevent additives like metabisulphites if you use enzymes for gluten network degradation as the proteases soften your gluten network instead of artificial additives,” reveals Konradt. Moreover, while energy costs play a significant role in baking, the cost of using the enzymes is “minimal.”

With a significant regulatory shift toward clean labels and more transparency in the food industry, Konradt says the company’s enzymes are processing aids, “meaning they do not end up on a label.”

“They could be considered as a clean label ingredient. But if you put everything you add to a product as a processing aid onto the label, people will begin to ask, ‘So what does it do?’ And actually, it doesn’t do anything in the final product. It does something before that in the process that benefits the overall cost or performance of the product,” he concludes.

ProSweets 2025 is taking place in Cologne from February 2-5 and is co-located with ISM.