Our economy is undergoing a complete transition from the current fossil-based to a sustainable biobased economy as a solution to the large societal and economic challenges. This transition creates a strong need for new technologies to convert renewable resources into a broad range of bioproducts, biomaterials and bioenergy. Industrial biotechnology, driven by metabolic engineering and synthetic biology, has been identified as a key enabling technology in the building process of libraries of potential microbial cell factories (MCFs) for producing such bioproducts. However, the transformation of wild type microorganisms into efficient, productive and robust MCFs remains an ennobled trial and error process. To this end, evolutionary biotechnology has attracted attention in recent years: adaptive laboratory evolution (ALE) is combined with high throughput screening methods, to generate and screen a massively diverse set of phenotypes and variants. In this project, we want to accelerate the industrial timeframe of traditional ALE approaches and apply an innovative and accelerated ALE to the non-model organism Lactobacillus casei for defined production of chitinpentaose. These molecules have a vast repertoire of application possibilities in sectors such as pharma, food, feed and cosmetics. Industry would greatly benefit from a probiotic chitooligosaccharides production system, starting from renewable resources, taking into account downstream processing and regulation costs.