Decoding ethnic fermented food systems: a narrative review of multi-omics approaches leading to personalized nutrition

Fermented foods have evolved to being scientifically optimized functional foods today with a market size projection to reach US$ 600 billion by 2035. These foods are essentially derived from traditional knowledge and are being tailored with therapeutic effects encompassing benefits on immunity, metabolism, gut health, and cognitive functionality. The profile of the target audience for this food category today ranges from infants to the geriatric population—the latter of which is expected to form the largest group in the next 20+ years. A literature search of NCBI and Pubmed databases identified studies on ethnic fermented foods across dairy, fermented plant-based foods (PBFs), and seafood categories. They were compiled according to the microbial taxa and omics approaches used—metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, and metabolomics. Lactic acid bacteria predominated across all three fermented food categories (dairy, plant-based, and seafood), while seafoods showed the presence of seafood specific microbes. Multi-omics evidence was more comprehensive for dairy and fermented plant-based foods, where metagenomics, metatranscriptomic and metabolomic data were available, whereas seafood was limited to metagenomic taxa and metabolomic data. These technologies, together converge into the new platform Nutrigenomics, which have become the foundation for functional foods industry. While considerable omics-related information is available on fermented foods in general, the focus on ethnic fermented foods is limited. Health and wellness being a mandatory part of lifestyle for a large population today, the nutrigenomics segment utilizes these datasets to create precision fermentation leading to personalized nutrition. Directions on 3D food printing, next-generation probiotics, AI-enabled analytics and advanced packaging are also added which can accelerate the development of precision-fermented functional foods tailored to genetic and microbiome profiles.