27 Oct 2025
Puratos’ mission is to help bakers worldwide to be more successful with their business, specifically by creating innovative food solutions for the health & well-being of people everywhere. In that perspective Puratos’ invests constantly in research to support the bakery sector in making breads healthier while keeping fantastic taste and texture.
The successful conclusion of the Bioticbread project from Puratos and University of Gent (CMET) marks a significant milestone in the pursuit of better health through everyday foods with a specific focus on gut health. The innovative sourdough bread developed through this three-year research demonstrated in vitro postbiotic properties that positively modulate the gut microbiome, produce health associated metabolites and protect the gut barrier, while retaining the traditional characteristics of sourdough. In a few words: this research showcased a potential way of creating gut benefits via postbiotics in bread application.
This achievement underscores the power of scientific cross-sector collaboration between academia and stakeholders in the bakery industry.
Puratos, in collaboration with the University of Gent research groups CMET (Center for Microbial Ecology and Technology) and LIMET (Laboratory of Integrative Metabolomics), is proud to announce the successful completion of the VLAIO-funded Bioticbread project (HBC.2021.0969).
Driven by a shared ambition to bring cutting-edge gut health science into real-world baked applications, this partnership set out to create a postbiotic-enriched sourdough bread with in vitro health benefits. The result: a pioneering product with postbiotic properties developed through rigorous research and deep expertise in both microbiology, metabolomics and bakery innovation.
While probiotics and prebiotics are well-established strategies to manage gut health and have long dominated the conversation, postbiotics are now emerging as a powerful and more stable alternative, especially for baked goods.
Unlike probiotics, which cannot survive high-heat baking processes, postbiotics are heat-stable, non-living bacterial products and metabolites that can effectively modulate the gut microbiome and provide numerous health benefits.
The Bioticbread project is not just a research success; it’s a call to action for the food industry to embrace gut health as a key pillar of innovation. It highlights the potential of postbiotics and positions sourdough bread as more than a traditional staple: it’s a way to make sourdough into a functional food.
As Puratos continues to lead the way in gut health within the bakery sector, consumers can look forward to more delicious, science-backed innovations that support their well-being from the inside out.
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