September 2025

Extrusion CoP #14 – Legume Protein Composition Dictates Texturization in Hydro-Thermal Protein-Starch Interaction

Welcome to all new members of the Food & Feed Extrusion Community of Practice and hello again to our returning members! To keep up the momentum from the highly successful Extrusion Symposium that we hosted at CSIRO last month, we continued our Community of Practice sessions this month.

For our September session, we were joined by Dr Lavaraj Devkota who gave a technical presentation on: “Legume Protein Composition Dictates Texturization in Hydro-Thermal Protein-Starch Interaction”. Lavaraj has been a Food Science Research Fellow at Monash University since 2021, where he specialised in plant proteins and the development of plant-based meat and dairy analogues products. Please see below for more details about this session.

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🎙️ Presentation Title: Legume Protein Composition Dictates Texturization in Hydro-Thermal Protein-Starch Interaction

👤 Presenter: Dr Lavaraj Devkota

📅 Date & Time:12 Sept 2025 – 9:30am (Melbourne time)

📍 Location: Online (MS Teams)

Presenter Bio:

Lavaraj Devkota is a food scientist and process engineer with nearly a decade of experience spanning academia and industry. He specialises in plant proteins and the development of plant-based meat and dairy analogues, with particular expertise in twin-screw extrusion and high-moisture extrusion (HME) product formulation. His work focuses on understanding structure–function relationships of food macromolecules and applying this knowledge to design innovative and commercially viable food products.

He obtained his PhD in Chemical Engineering (Food Process Engineering) from Monash University in 2021 through a flagship Graduate Research Industry Partnership (GRIP) program. Since then, he has led industry-collaborative projects with companies such as Simplot Australia, Kraft Heinz ANZ, and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM, USA) as a research fellow at Monash University. His research also includes non-thermal technologies such as pulsed electric field (PEF) and ultrasound for mass transfer application and recently for protein and starch modification.

An active member of the Australian Institute of Food Science and Technology and the Australian Food Engineering Association, Dr. Devkota is passionate about bridging research and industry to advance sustainable food innovation.

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