Future Prospects of Food Fermentation in Malaysia

What is fermentation? In biochemical term, Standbury (1984) defined fermentation as the catabolism process of organic compound which generate energy. This fermentation process has been used in a lot of fields, such as food preservation, biomass, enzyme production, waste management, antibiotics etc. it is true that nowadays, fermentation products cannot be separated with our life, especially fermented food. The development of fermentation industry started before 1900 with the production of fermented beverages and food (Standbury, 1984). Some famous products of fermentation products are bread, cheese, yoghurt, and many more.

Law, Abu Bakar, Mat Hashim, and Abdul Hamid (2011) concluded that fermentation is one of the oldest and widely used food preservation methods in households, small-scale food industries as well as in large enterprise. Fermented foods generally preserved pleasant flavor, aroma, texture, enhanced nutritive values and good keeping quality under ambient conditions. (p.1)

Further, fermented food itself is interpreted by Campbell-Platt (1987) “as those foods which have been subjected to the action of micro-organisms or enzymes so that desirable biochemical changes cause significant modification to the food.” (As cited in Sahlin, 1999, p.5)

Countries in eastern Asia are famous with a variety of traditional food fermentation products. For instance, Korea with their kimchi, Japan with natto, china with soy sauce, and paneer from India. In Southeast Asia, particularly Malaysia, tapai, tempeh, jeruk, budu, cincalok, and tempoyak are really well known as the local fermented food products.

Malaysian Fermented Products

As mentioned previously, Malaysia has a lot of local fermented food products. The substrat...

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...-harvest losses. Fish fermentation is a promising way to reduce post-harvest losses in fishing industry (Ismael, nd). Budu, cincalok and belacan are the example of marine fermented product in Malaysia. However, the production of these products is still limited. Most of the fish fermented industries in Malaysia are still in the small scale and traditional.

At present, the market of the Malaysian fish fermented products remains to fulfill the local demand. As comparison, Thailand is reported to be the largest fish sauce exporter in the world with more than USD $13 million to US, Japan and Australia export annually (Brillantes, 1999 as cited in Sim, Chye, Anton, nd). Sim et al. (nd) proposed that the limitation of the local Malaysian fish sauce producer is due to the long fermentation time, limited technology and skill which cause low quality control of the products.