Concepts

Premium Vegan Brioche: Cost-effective, Plant-Based, Pure Indulgence

Concepts

Food & Nutrition

IMCD Value Talks: Cost Optimisation Without Compromise on Taste and Texture

1
Balanced Hybrid Sausage: A Smarter Way to Savoury Innovation
2
Indulgent Hybrid Burger: An Affordable Alternative with No Trade-Offs
3
Premium Vegan Brioche: Cost-effective, Plant-Based, Pure Indulgence

Soft, golden, and deliciously rich, our Premium Vegan Brioche demonstrates that indulgence doesn’t require compromise.

Egg Reduction to Balance Costs

Innova Market Insights 2026 Top Ten Trends highlights “worth every bite”, framing how product price and value have become core purchase criteria globally under ongoing economic pressure.

Eggs are a major cost component for bakery formulators, and alternative egg systems are increasingly popular, driven by cost management, functionality, and resilience against egg price volatility. These solutions allow manufacturers to reduce or replace eggs while maintaining volume, aeration, and texture (1).

Overcoming Technical Challenges with Premium Vegan Brioche

In bakery formulations, a traditional brioche is characterized by a complex matrix that combines gluten, fats, sugars, and egg proteins. Our formulation aims to improve the nutritional and technological profile of a traditional brioche - while remaining cost-effective - by being:

Egg-free
Sugar reduced
Fibre-enriched
Process-optimized
Butter-free
Sustainable (i.e. with prolonged shelf-life)

Key Challenges	Our Solutions
Nutritional improvement: fibre enrichment & sugar reduction	Soluble fibres replace sucrose while maintaining fermentation and texture, enabling Nutri-Score E to D improvement. Sweetness modifiers restore taste and ensure sensory balance without compromising quality
Vegan / egg reduction: structure and cost balance	Starches, insoluble fibres, and faba bean proteins restore structure, emulsification, and gas retention, ensuring volume, stability, and texture while enabling effective and cost-efficient egg replacement
Process optimization: dough tolerance and volume	Enzymes and improvers (gluten, L-cysteine, amylases, xylanases) strengthen the dough, balance extensibility, and improve machinability, fermentation, and volume in complex, high-fat formulations
Dairy fat replacement: taste, color, mouthfeel	Vegan butter flavour restores key aromatic notes, while beta-carotene recreates the typical yellow colour, ensuring an authentic brioche taste and appearance without dairy ingredients
Shelf-life & sustainability: softness and clean label	Emulsifiers and maltogenic amylases improve softness and delay staling, while cultured wheat flour replaces calcium propionate, ensuring mold control, longer shelf life, and clean label compliance

Egg replacement

Eggs are a major cost component for bakery formulators but also play an essential role. They contribute to structure formation through protein coagulation, to the emulsification of lipid and aqueous phases via lecithin, as well as to the colour and sensory properties of the finished product. Their removal leads to a significant decrease in dough stability and its ability to retain fermentation gases. This results in reduced specific volume, a less stringy texture, and a more fragile crumb.

Our approach to egg replacement:

Starches: They provide specific gelling properties that support oven spring during baking.
Insoluble fibres: They have good water uptake and water-holding capacity while providing structure.
Faba bean proteins: These plant-derived proteins offer good solubility, emulsifying, and binding properties, making them an ideal alternative to egg and milk proteins.

Sugar reduction

Sucrose serves several essential functions, including acting as a fermentable substrate for yeast, a water-retaining agent, and a contributor to soft texture and coloration through the Maillard reaction. Reducing its content leads to decreased fermentation activity, loss of softness, and less pronounced coloration. Additionally, sensory acceptability may be affected.

To balance the reduced sugar content:

Soluble fibres: Soluble dietary fibres allow sugar reduction while delivering an improved nutritional profile and a fibre-enriched brioche. Additionally, they ensure good process stability and yeast fermentation tolerance.
Natural flavours: Natural sweetness-modifying flavours are included in our formulation to restore the sweetness lost from reduced sucrose.

Process optimization

Due to their high fat and sugar content, brioche doughs ferment more slowly and are more sensitive to variations in the production process. Dough tolerance (i.e. the dough's ability to withstand variations in time and temperature) is often reduced in modified formulations. The specific lamination and folding process used for this hybrid brioche is even more demanding and can weaken the dough structure, as it requires both high extensibility and stability, qualities that are generally difficult to combine.

How we address stability and volume:

Wheat gluten: Reinforces the gluten network and provides elasticity and stability.
Vegan L-cysteine: A vegan reducing agent that improves dough extensibility and machinability.
Alpha-amylases: Optimize yeast fermentation, increase volume, and deliver a fine crumb texture.
Xylanases: Stabilize the dough and optimize the non-starch polysaccharide network and gluten development.

Butter replacement

Dairy butter gives brioche its characteristic sensory properties, particularly in terms of aroma and texture, thanks to its specific crystallization profile. Replacing butter with margarine often results in a significant loss of aromatic complexity and changes in the colour of the crumb and crust. Since butter is rich in characteristic volatile compounds (i.e. diacetyl, lactones), its absence leads to a more neutral sensory profile.

Our fix to non-dairy butter:

Natural flavours: The addition of natural butter flavours replicates buttery notes and restores the product’s characteristic aroma.
Beta-Carotene: This natural colour compensates for the loss of the yellow hue.

Prolonged shelf-life

The staling of brioche is primarily due to starch retrogradation, as well as water migration and lipid oxidation. These processes lead to gradual crumb firming. To prevent this:

DMG: E471 improves initial crumb softness and freshness retention.
SSL: E481 improves dough properties and increases softness.
Maltogenic amylases: Slow down starch retrogradation, improving softness, freshness retention, and crumb resilience. They work in synergy with DMG.

Synthetic calcium propionate (E282) is the most commonly used source of propionic acid in baking to inhibit mold growth and extend microbiological shelf life. Its effectiveness is based on antifungal activity. However, its use often has a negative consumer perception in the context of “clean label” initiatives. Our alternative:

Cultured wheat flour: A natural ingredient obtained through C14-certified fermentation with a high propionic acid content.

Baking the Future of Food

Built for process efficiency and consistency, our Premium Vegan Brioche supports industrial scalability while delivering the authentic sensory experience consumers love. It is a bakery innovation where plant-based functionality meets premium quality, while remaining cost-efficient.

IMCD can help you develop your next bakery innovation. Reach out to an expert and discover how our Premium Vegan Brioche can inspire you to create affordable, nutritious, and delicious solutions.

Sources:

https://blog.foodsconnected.com/2026-food-industry-trends