Question

5) Abdullah set a goal for himself to have a global brand for juices and soft drinks. After all the financial feasibility studies that he set, the price of his products are still costly and probably will not attract the consumers. The reason behind that is the large quantity of lemons, which is expensive, per cup of juice. He was wondering how the companies of soft drinks can manage the massive supply of citric acid compared to the low price of the product. After a long search on internet, he found that "Most of the citric acid made today is produced by Fungi"!!! How can you help Abdullah make sure that this information is not fake? And how he can convince his customers to consume products made up of microbial sources? (5 marks)

Answer 1

Citric acid is a common metabolite which has a very high commercial demand. Indeed, presently its commercial source are microbes most importantly several fungal species. The shift to microbes for citric acid production owes to its ever-increasing demand in food and pharmaceutical industries. Earlier lemon juice served as its sole commercial source, however, it resulted in high-cost production as well as its world trade was largely dominated by European countries particularly Italy. Therefore, many industrialist and capitalist got engaged in digging up the alternate production sources in order to combat the high production cost as well as the monopoly of Italy over the trade. After many technical as well as experimental attempts, the fungi “Aspergillus niger” came into commercial light and a chemical method of microbial fermentation came into existence over conventional biological method which proved to be advantageous in terms of lower production cost and easy availability. Since then there have been attempts to search for newer cost-effective techniques for its production, however, till today, microbial fermentation is widely accepted and a main commercially applied technique.

The use of microbes for a food product is not a novel concept to the world. The food processed by micro-organism is being consumed since ancient times in almost every part of the world. People are consuming bread, curd, wine, yoghurt, appam, atchara, beer, brem, cheese, dhokla, dosa since decades. Therefore, the safety of using microbes for food product can be authenticated on their historical consumption all over the world. Still countries such as United states and European union have enforced several laws to regulate the type and safety of applied micro-organism in food industry. Although traditionally used micro-organisms are generally regarded as safe for consumption.