From ancestral fermentations to engineered food consortia

Fermented foods exemplify self-organized microbial ecosystems shaped by ecological filtering, domestication, and sustained human selection. This review explores how ecological insights from traditional fermentations guide the rational design of engineered microbial consortia in contemporary food biotechnology. Across various substrates and cultural contexts, fermented systems illustrate that functional stability, metabolic complementarity, and reproducible biochemical outputs arise from structured community interactions rather than from individual strains. Recent advances in multiomics, culturomics, and genome-scale metabolic modeling facilitate the systematic identification of core microbiota and ecosystem-level functional phenotypes that underpin fermentation performance. These developments are shifting fermentation from an empirical practice to a predictive, design-oriented discipline. Integrating ecological theory with systems-level biotechnology, traditional fermentations offer conceptual and experimental frameworks for constructing minimal yet robust microbial consortia. Such strategies enable the development of next-generation fermented foods with enhanced nutritional, functional, and sensory attributes, while preserving ecological robustness and process reproducibility.