Canada’s booming plant protein industry has plenty going for it: farmers are expanding fields of peas, fava beans, and soy, while food brands race to launch meat-free burgers, dairy-free shakes, and high-protein snacks. But anyone who's tasted a gritty protein shake or felt uneasy after finishing a plant-based burger knows there’s still room for improvement. Chalky textures, off-flavours, and digestion discomfort remain stubborn issues that can limit consumer adoption and create headaches for animal-feed producers.
Calgary-based CBS Bio Platforms believes it has the answer to better plant proteins. With funding from CFIN’s Innovation Booster program, CBS is scaling up production of a specialized protease enzyme sourced from the microbe Bacillus subtilis, designed to boost plant protein digestibility and flavour.
At its core, CBS’s enzyme works like precision scissors, snipping the long, complex protein chains of plants into smaller peptides that human and animal digestive systems can handle more easily. Early tests show the enzyme significantly raises the digestibility scores of proteins like pea isolate, reducing gritty texture and bitter, "beany" flavours at the same time.
In practical terms, that means protein shakes that go down smoothly and plant-based dairy alternatives without the off-putting aftertaste. For animal-feed producers, it’s a similar win—better digestibility means animals absorb more nutrition from less feed, cutting waste, cost, and environmental impact.
CBS Bio Platforms is using the Innovation Booster funds to validate and optimize its enzyme production at a commercial scale. This includes running pilot fermentations at the 1,000-litre mark, refining purification steps, and testing the enzyme’s shelf stability in real-world food and feed formulations. CBS expects full commercial availability by early 2026, followed soon after by regulatory approval in the U.S.
If CBS’s enzyme solution proves itself at scale, plant-based foods could finally shake off their gritty, bitter reputation, and Canadian producers—both food and feed—might find their crops easier to digest, in every sense of the word.