Vivatra

Food brands and manufacturers lose time and money when promising ingredients fail at the pilot or scale-up stage because formulation choices, processing constraints and regulatory requirements were not addressed early. Vivatra steps in at this stage by designing food products with these constraints considered from the outset, whether using conventional, novel or underutilised ingredients, helping companies reduce trial-and-error, failed pilot runs and avoidable scale-up loops.

Founded in 2025 and operating downstream of ingredient innovation, Vivatra focuses on converting functional ingredient innovation into product-level outcomes. The company integrates formulation, regulation, processing, and sustainability into a single development workflow, so key feasibility decisions are made before resources are committed to pilot trials or industrial-scale up.

AI-Powered Pathways to Better Nutrition

This workflow is powered by the Vivatra Product Design Engine (PDE), a domain-trained, AI-enabled development platform that surfaces viable formulation, processing, and compliance pathways early in development.

Without food-specific systems, teams often run sequential iterations. A formulation that works in the lab fails under production shear or heat. A process-stable product may fall short of labelling or regional compliance requirements. Raw material variability can also affect texture, shelf life, or sensory performance. The PDE moves these checks earlier, narrowing development to pathways that are more likely to scale.

Generic AI tools often underperform in food R&D because they do not account for ingredient variability, process sensitivity, or region-specific regulatory constraints. The PDE is built around these realities, allowing commercial viability, regulatory feasibility, and sustainability to be evaluated together rather than treated as downstream hurdles.

In practice, Vivatra works with alternative protein sources and functional ingredients derived from regional agro-industrial side streams, including brewer’s yeast and sour cherry pits. These are combined selectively with other technologies where they offer clear functional or sustainability benefits. Sustainability is addressed at the design stage by prioritising efficient use of raw materials and reducing waste, and treating side streams as functional components that contribute nutritional, structural, and sensory value.

“Vivatra unites science, AI, and sustainability to help SMEs make earlier development decisions and bring manufacturable, compliant products to market,” says MSc. Jovana Tomić Poepelt, director, Vivatra.

From Ingredients to Market-Ready Food

The impact of Vivatra’s workflow is evident across client projects validated through scale-up trials and pre-launch preparation.

For Natura Gusto, Vivatra developed eight new products, including clean-label Ajvar and sauces in doypack format. These products rely on the natural structural properties of fruits, vegetables, and grains rather than processed stabilisers or emulsifiers.

For Desing Ltd, the team reformulated a HoReCa sauce portfolio, by removing modified starches and unnecessary stabilisers and reducing sugar content by over 30 per cent. Working with Dolovac Organic, Vivatra redesigned fruit rolls into playful “fruit spaghetti,” using apple side streams to prevent agglomeration during storage without the use of anti-caking agents.

In the frozen desserts category, Vivatra formulated a clean-label ice-cream-style product without added sugar or stabilisers, achieving overrun, melting behaviour, and texture comparable to conventional industrial formulations. Several solutions are currently in scale-up or preparation for market launch.

Clients, including Clas Comerc, Lomax Company, and HomeMade Company, value Vivatra’s structured, data-driven development approach combined with a practical understanding of production constraints.

Headquartered at the Science Technology Park in Belgrade and serving clients across Southeast and wider Europe, Vivatra is supported by early-stage strategic investors and academic collaborations with the Faculty of Agriculture at the University of Belgrade. These partnerships support shelf-life modelling, method development, and continued expansion of Vivatra’s validation and deployment capabilities across the European food industry.