The Future of Food in Brussels

Why fermentation is key to sustainable food systems and how Brussels is leading the way.

Brussels has a habit of hiding its best stories in plain sight. You’ll find them in narrow streets and quiet courtyards, behind doors that don’t advertise much. You’ll hear one pop with a cork and a soft sigh of carbonation: a bottle of gueuze opened at a table. And suddenly the city’s relationship with microbes—old, intimate, and strangely futuristic—makes perfect sense.

Fermentation is often sold as a foodie fascination: jars, bubbles, “gut health,” a new kimchi place opening every other month. But in reality, it’s something far more useful. Fermentation is infrastructure. It’s a tool for preservation, flavor, resilience—and, increasingly, a key piece of what sustainable food systems can look like.

Brussels, with its mix of culinary traditions and stubborn local pride, is turning that idea into practice.

Fermentation isn’t a trend. It’s a system.

The climate-and-food conversation tends to get stuck in extremes: lab-made miracles on one end, nostalgic back-to-the-land fantasies on the other. Fermentation sits in the middle, quietly practical. It does what sustainable food policy needs most: it reduces loss, stretches seasons, and creates value out of what would otherwise be wasted.

It does this in ways that aren’t theoretical:

• It buys time. Vegetables that might spoil become kraut, pickles, kimchi. Milk becomes yogurt, kefir. Fruit can become vinegar. That extra time is the difference between “surplus” and “waste.”

• It upgrades leftovers. Stale bread, trimmings, imperfect produce—fermentation has a long history of turning side-streams into something purposeful.

• It delivers big flavor with modest inputs. Acid, umami, complexity: fermentation makes food feel complete without leaning so hard on resource-heavy ingredients.

Brussels has been talking about exactly these outcomes through its regional Good Food Strategy, which connects food waste reduction, circular approaches, and more sustainable production and consumption. The message is simple: sustainability isn’t just about what we eat, but about how the whole chain behaves.
And the circular-economy lens, also explored in Brussels case work by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, keeps coming back to the same pressure point: organic waste is only “waste” if you treat it that way.

Brussels and the romance of wild fermentation

If Brussels has a fermentation flagship, it’s not a jar. It’s a bottle.

Gueuze, blended, bottle-conditioned, sharp-edged and celebratory, belongs to a family of beers built on ambient microflora. Lambic is not fermented in the tidy, controlled way that modern production prefers. It’s shaped by air, old wood, time, temperature, and place. It’s Brussels terroir in liquid form.

The most vivid expression of that tradition is Cantillon, which is both a working brewery and a museum of living methods. The building isn’t a stage set: it’s an operating ecosystem.
In a world obsessed with standardization, gueuze insists on something else: that “local” can be literal, microscopic, and impossible to copy exactly.

And that’s precisely why it matters for the future. Sustainable systems need approaches that don’t collapse when supply chains wobble. Fermentation, historically, is what communities used when they couldn’t afford fragility.

Brussels is the sole place this Geuze can be made: the city's air gives it a distinct character.

Fermenthings and the practical, everyday ferment

There’s another Brussels fermentation story that’s less romantic but arguably more important: skills.

Fermentation becomes powerful when it’s normal—when it lives in kitchens, cafés, small producers, community workshops. That’s where projects like Fermenthings come in, building a bridge between craft and everyday habit: classes, starters, practical know-how, the kind of guidance that makes fermentation feel accessible instead of intimidating.

This is what sustainable food systems look like in real life: not one grand solution, but a thousand small competencies. People learning how to preserve. Small businesses creating value locally. Seasonal peaks being absorbed instead of dumped.

Chocolate: Belgium’s most famous fermented product (even if no one says it)

Belgium, and Brussels as it’s capital, is a chocolate nation, everyone knows that. What’s talked about less is that chocolate’s flavor begins with fermentation long before it becomes a bar, a truffle, a praline in a polished box.

Fresh cocoa beans don’t taste like chocolate. The transformation starts when cocoa pulp and beans ferment together: microbes consume sugars, produce heat and acids, and trigger the chemical changes that create the building blocks of chocolate aroma while reducing harsh bitterness.

Researchers and writers have been increasingly clear about how decisive those microbial communities can be—sometimes pushing a batch toward fruitiness, florals, or deeper cocoa notes.
In craft circles, experiments like “co-fermentation” are stretching chocolate’s flavor vocabulary even further, the way winemakers talk about fermentation choices shaping the final glass.

So yes, Brussels can celebrate gueuze as a local icon. But it’s also sitting in the middle of a country whose most famous export is built on the same principle: controlled chaos, guided by microbes.

Why Brussels is a natural fermentation capital

Brussels is dense. It’s multilingual. It’s culturally layered. It’s full of small businesses and communities with distinct food traditions. That’s exactly the kind of environment where fermentation thrives.

Because fermentation isn’t only about technology, it’s about networks:

• networks of people sharing methods,

• networks of small producers supplying neighborhoods,

• networks that keep value local and cut waste at the edges.

And it dovetails neatly with the region’s ambitions around food waste, circularity, and better food governance.

The future of food will taste like microbes

A lot of “future of food” storytelling is shiny: new proteins, new factories, new patents. Fermentation is different. It’s cheap, adaptable, and deeply human. It’s also, quietly, one of the most reliable ways we have to make food systems less wasteful and more resilient—without asking everyone to eat joyless meals or wait for a miracle.

In Brussels, you can see that future already taking shape: in a glass of gueuze, in a workshop where someone learns to keep a starter alive, in the invisible fermentation that makes chocolate taste like chocolate in the first place.

The future won’t be built by a single breakthrough. It will be built the way a good culture is built: step by step, batch by batch.

Fermenthings: The City’s Wildest Flavours

Brussels has always been a city of double lives. Grand façades, backroom energy. A capital of institutions that still makes room for the weird, the artisanal, the deliciously stubborn. If you’ve joined our fermentation tour, you’ve already felt that tension—between heritage and experimentation, between a bottle of gueuze and a jar that’s quietly fizzing on a shelf.

Which is exactly why Fermenthings belongs in the story.

Because while Brussels’ fermentation identity is often told through lambic and gueuze—wild yeast, old barrels, time as an ingredient—Fermenthings shows the other Brussels: the one building the next layer of culture. The one asking what fermentation can do for waste, for local production, for skills, for pleasure. Not as a niche hobby. As a system.

A shop, a lab, a clubhouse for microbes

Fermenthings describes itself as a place “for all things fermented”, and they mean it. The shop is open Wednesday to Sunday, with coffee, hot sauces to taste, a fermentation library to browse, and homemade ferments like kimchi to take home.

But that description “shop” doesn’t fully capture what’s really going on. Because the core idea isn’t retail. It’s access. Fermenthings runs workshops that range from vinegar and kimchi to hot sauce and kombucha, designed to turn curiosity into competence.

That’s why we love bringing people here on the tour: Fermenthings doesn’t just serve fermentation. It teaches it. It demystifies it. It makes it feel doable, and then makes it taste irresistible.

Yannick and his team at fermenthings

Yannick Schandené, and the refusal to follow a blueprint

Every story has a strong character and behind Fermenthings is Yannick Schandené. He is one of the people who helped pull fermentation out of the margins in Brussels and into everyday food culture. In a city that can be cautious about new concepts, he built something that didn’t really exist yet—what he called, bluntly, a space without a template. “There is no blueprint for a space dedicated to fermentation,” he told Brussels Beer City while describing the project’s evolution.

That line matters because it explains the whole Fermenthings energy: the willingness to build first, refine later, and keep moving as the community grows.

Fermenthings started as a shop in Jette (2017), a place for ferments from across Belgium, with workshops, tastings, and early experiments. Then came an “on tour” phase, pop-ups and events (including a noted kimchi party in Ixelles), while the team prepared the next iteration.

In May 2019, Fermenthings landed at BE-HERE, a Brussels hub for sustainable food businesses, where it collaborated with a microbrewery (La Source) and later a kombucha maker—hosting brunches, workshops, and catering across the city.

And then, like so many food projects, it had to survive the COVID era—pause, reassess, re-emerge.

From “cool ferments” to circular fermentation

What makes Fermenthings more than a lovely stop on a food lover’s weekend is the way it links fermentation to a bigger question: what can we do with what we normally waste?

Their Urban Fermentory / Lab opened at BE-HERE in September 2020 as a space dedicated to fermented food research, supported by regional funding to develop products like limonades, shoyu and miso using spent grains from beer.

That’s not marketing fluff. It’s a real-world illustration of how fermentation can help build circular food systems: taking a side-stream (spent grain) and using microbes to transform it into something shelf-stable, useful, and—crucially desirable.

The lab is also intentionally community-facing. Fermenthings frames it with FabLab-inspired thinking: sharing access to tools and logistics, and leaning into open exchange rather than closed-door “R&D theatre.”

This is the part of our tour narrative that clicks for a lot of guests: Brussels isn’t just preserving fermentation traditions, it’s upgrading them into an urban model for the future.

The Urban Fermentory era : a fermentation ecosystem under one roof

In early 2024, Fermenthings expanded again—moving within BE-HERE into a bigger space and formally becoming an Urban Fermentory with dedicated rooms for different kinds of fermentation and production. Yannick’s goal is to create a genuine living network around his production facility, which he envisions as a continuous fermentation process rather than a mere shop.

“At one time with my project fermentathing is that I got a bit stuck into a wall. We are there doing our buisness and it felt that i got a bit stuck in the process.  

What we could choose is to choose like growth and unlimited growth like they say in the economy but that’s not how nature works. Nature finds its way, turn around, growns. It isn’t something that you can lock up, that you can block in one thing. 

So when we developed, we said : ‘Okay, can we not use the fermentation as also the way that we create the buisness ?’ From there came out The Urban Fermentory. ” -Yannick Schandené

According to Fermenthings’ own timeline, the new setup brings together drinks projects, food transformation, koji/miso production, and sourdough bread—alongside partners like Nuu Miso, Malyce (honey wine), SCOB (non-alcoholic drinks), FELFEL (harissa), and bread cooperatives (including COOPAINS and La Source Du Pain).

That matters because it turns fermentation from a single craft into a shared platform—an ecosystem where ideas cross-pollinate, where a beverage project can feed a vinegar experiment, where “waste” becomes ingredient, and where learning is baked into the architecture.

A Human Prototype

Beyond being just a shop, Fermenthings aims to be a meeting point where the right to make mistakes is not only accepted but encouraged to faster learning. Yannick sees his role as the creator of a resilient ecosystem :

“For me The Urban Factory is a prototype. It’s also something that I want to see reused at other places in othr contexts. It’s really a human thing to do. Sometimes it even looks messy, but at the end what’s good is that it create a resilient environment to grow really cool stuff out of it. 

We really want a place where people can meet, where they can share their mistakes, where they can learn, where people can really try and get their hands dirty.”-Yannick Schandené

At the end, Yannick show us a different and more human way to see the circular fermentation ; A way that’s like if we were all part of it. For him the biggest point that everybode have to know is that mistake and time make can make the food taste different, sometimes worse but sometimes even better.

In the end, Yannick shows us a more humane way to view the fermentation process one where we are all active participants in a living system. For him, time and mistakes are the very ingredients that give food its character; while they may lead to failure at times, they are often the secret to creating something even better. The goal is to learn from our mistakes, to correct from them and to share them to create more fermentation.

“Fermentation is all about time. Giving it time, it’s going to help it become better, you cannot force the processus. If you want to create the good taste, you need to give it the right time.  

For us it’s a bit like when we’re waiting to the tomatoes to grow : some of them will be riper at one point, other will take more time, other will maybe be green and stay green. You can still use them in others ways ; we don’t need to be all red ripe tomatoes not at the same time but together we can find that process and make it stronger.” -Yannick Schandené

Inside fermenthings fermentation vault.

Brunch as a manifesto

If you want to understand Fermenthings in one sitting, don’t overthink it, go to brunch.

Their Exploration Brunch, hosted monthly at BE-HERE, is framed as “a discovery buffet” built from Fermenthings’ lab work and partner experiments—explicitly designed around the “future of food”: locally sourced, zero waste, low carbon, reproducible.

It’s also classic Fermenthings: serious about sustainability, not serious about being solemn. Guests, collaborations, a little bit of chaos. A reminder that the best way to sell the future is to make it delicious.

Why Fermenthings belongs on our tour

Our tour is built around a simple promise: Brussels has hidden fermentation gems—and they tell you something bigger about how food can work.

Fermenthings is one of those gems because it bridges the old Brussels fermentation story (spontaneous beer cultures, local taste traditions) with the newer one: skills, community, circular thinking, and small-scale production that can actually scale in impact.

On the tour, Fermenthings is where we step into fermentation as a living practice—where you can taste it, yes, but also understand it as a toolkit you can take home. It’s where microbes stop being a concept and start being a craft.

And Yannick, part pioneer, part connector, part relentless thinkerer—is a big reason that this exists at all: a Brussels place where fermentation isn’t boxed into one category, one cuisine, or one aesthetic. It’s allowed to be messy, global, local, and deeply Brussels at the same time.

Which is, honestly, the most Brussels thing of all.