Sweethoven Biotech at EIT Food NEXT BITE 2025 in Brussels
In October 2025, Dr. André Neff and Dr. Marcel Hövels presented the Sweethoven Biotech research project at EIT Food NEXT BITE in Brussels. The project was represented with its own booth in the event’s Startup Village — despite Sweethoven Biotech itself being a university research and transfer project rather than a founded start-up.
The event provided an opportunity to present our research on sweet-tasting dietary fiber candidates and to exchange perspectives with researchers, food-industry representatives and other participants from the European food innovation ecosystem.
Our connection to EIT Food began through the Seedbed Incubator 2023. The programme helped the project establish contacts for application-oriented validation and contributed to the development of collaborations that have since supported testing of selected carbohydrate candidates in food applications.
Visitors at NEXT BITE were also able to see application examples developed by Master’s student Aamir Lonne as part of his thesis work. These included cookie and raspberry jam prototypes used to explore how selected carbohydrate candidates behave in different food matrices.
The discussions in Brussels provided valuable feedback for the project’s ongoing validation activities. Within the current VIP+ phase, Sweethoven Biotech continues to investigate the scientific, technological and application-related potential of selected carbohydrate candidates.
We thank EIT Food and everyone who visited the booth for the conversations, questions and perspectives shared during the event.