Highlights•Complex food fermentations can experience reproducibility issues.•Spatial
structure created by kefir and kombucha protects microbial cells from stress.•Spatial …

Traditional biotechnological applications of microorganisms employ mono-cultivation or co-
cultivation in well-mixed vessels disregarding the potential of spatially organized cultures …

For thousands of years, humans have enjoyed the novel flavors, increased shelf-life, and
nutritional benefits that microbes provide in fermented foods and beverages. Recent …

Highlights•Starter microorganisms used in food fermentations have been domesticated by
humans.•Adaptation of starters to food niches was accompanied by several gene loss and …

In the last two decades major changes have occurred in how microbial ecologists study
microbial communities. Limitations associated with traditional culture-based methods have …

Highlights•Microbial consortia offer advantages to bioprocessing via complementary
metabolism.•Metabolic modeling and engineering aid the design of microbial …

Spontaneous fermentations that do not rely on backslopping or industrial starter cultures
were especially important to the early development of society and are still practiced around …

Microbial communities often undergo intricate compositional changes yet also maintain
stable coexistence of diverse species. The mechanisms underlying long-term coexistence …

With the elucidation of community structures and assembly mechanisms in various
fermented foods, core communities that significantly influence or guide fermentation have …

Highlights•The importance of phenotypic variation in spatially structured microbial groups is
currently underappreciated.•Cellular activities can cause phenotypic variation and change …