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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.

On 24 September 2025, Dr. André Neff and Dr. Marcel Hövels represented Sweethoven Biotech at Ideenfutter Expo in Neuss. As part of the BIO.NRW joint booth, they introduced visitors to the project’s research on sweet-tasting dietary fiber candidates and discussed current questions surrounding their production and potential use in food systems.

The annual event brings together participants from food research, industry and the wider innovation ecosystem. It gave the team an opportunity to present the scientific approach behind Sweethoven Biotech and to gather application-related perspectives from professionals working across the food sector.

Cookie and raspberry jam prototypes developed by Aamir Lonne as part of his master’s thesis provided tangible examples of the project’s application-oriented research. These model foods are being used to explore how selected carbohydrate candidates behave in different formulations. They are research prototypes rather than finished consumer products.

The conversations in Neuss offered useful input for the project’s next validation steps, including further work on process optimisation, material characterisation and application testing. They also provided opportunities to identify questions that are particularly relevant when moving a new carbohydrate candidate from laboratory research towards possible future use.

We thank the Foodhub NRW team, especially M. Lee Greene and Constanze Hepp, for organising the event, BIO.NRW for hosting the joint booth and everyone who visited us for the constructive exchange.

Sweethoven Biotech was featured in the ZDF documentary “Zuckeralternativen – Genuss mit Beigeschmack”, broadcast on May 25, 2025 as part of the planet e. series.

The documentary explored a broad range of sugar alternatives and looked at questions surrounding nutrition, sustainability and production. As part of the programme, the ZDF team visited the University of Bonn to present our research on sweet dietary-fiber candidates and the biotechnological approach behind Sweethoven Biotech.

We were very pleased to contribute to the documentary and to bring our research into a wider public discussion about alternatives to conventional sugar. At the same time, the programme highlighted how complex the evaluation of sugar alternatives can be, with technological, nutritional and environmental aspects all playing a role.

For Sweethoven Biotech, these questions are central to our ongoing research. We investigate selected carbohydrate candidates, their production and purification, and their potential functional properties in future food applications.

The German Biotechnology Days 2025 in Heidelberg turned into a particularly memorable event for Sweethoven Biotech: our research and transfer project received both the Innovation Award of the German BioRegions and the Audience Award in the session “New Kids on the Block in Industrial Biotech”.

During the two-day event, we presented our work on sweet dietary-fiber candidates and the progress made in scaling the underlying biotechnological process. Thanks to the ongoing DATIpilot project, we were also able to present a batch of our candidate material to Heidelberg and the conference visitors. The event led to many valuable conversations with researchers, biotechnology experts and representatives from industry about the scientific approach and possible future application contexts.

Receiving the Innovation Award 2025 of the German BioRegions, endowed with €2,000, was a strong recognition of the transfer potential of our research. We were equally delighted to receive the Audience Award with 55% of the votes, making the event an encouraging milestone for the continued development of Sweethoven Biotech.

In October, we had the opportunity to present Sweethoven Biotech at NEXT BITE 2024 in Rome, EIT Food’s flagship event bringing together actors from across the European food innovation ecosystem.

As alumni of the EIT Food Seedbed Incubator 2023, we joined the event with our own booth at the La Nuvola Conference Centre, where we presented our research on sweet dietary-fiber candidates and shared first samples with visitors. The two days offered plenty of opportunities to discuss our approach with food-sector companies, researchers and other stakeholders and to exchange ideas about potential future application contexts.

For us, NEXT BITE was particularly valuable as a chance to move beyond the laboratory perspective and gather direct feedback on how our candidates could be evaluated in food applications. We are grateful to EIT Food for supporting our participation with a €600 travel grant and for giving us the opportunity to present our work within the wider EIT Food community.

We are pleased to welcome Ye-One Rhie to the Institute for Microbiology and Biotechnology at the University of Bonn.

As a Member of the German Bundestag and the Committee on Education, Research and Technology Assessment, she joins us for an exchange on the research behind Sweethoven Biotech and the recently launched DATIpilot Innovation Sprint.

During the visit, we present our work on the biotechnological production of sweet dietary-fiber candidates, the ongoing scale-up and purification process, and the potential of these candidates for future application-oriented studies.

The discussion also provides an opportunity to exchange perspectives on research transfer, public funding and the path from university research toward potential future applications.

The DATIpilot Innovation Sprint “Sweethoven Biotech” has officially started at the University of Bonn.

With funding of €178,517 from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the project focuses on advancing the production and purification of a sweet dietary-fiber candidate developed at the Institute for Microbiology and Biotechnology.

A central objective is to develop and scale a chromatographic purification process that can provide larger quantities of the candidate material for further application-oriented studies.

The project runs from June 2024 to May 2025 under the leadership of Dr. Marcel Hövels.

The project marks an important step from fundamental research toward the systematic evaluation of potential future applications. Sweethoven Biotech is used in this context as the name of the applied research and transfer project at the University of Bonn.