Setting up Brewery for Innovation that Combats Food Waste

Dealing with waste in the agri-food industry comes with the pressure for high quality of the end product. We played a crucial role in setting up production processes that ensured high quality standards.

- The challenge -

From a Circular Vision to Production

Committed to sustainability, ProSeed adopts a circular approach by repurposing by-products from the agri-food industry, focusing on brewing co-products like barley malt. This results in a sustainable ingredient, boosting food products with additional protein and fibre. Their vision transcends local impact, aiming to transform the European food sector through a sustainable approach to plant by-product recovery.

There was only one major catch - the barley by-product was classified as feed, not a food-grade ingredient. ProSeed assigned us with the task to set up production facility and establish processes in a way that the final product is a food grade quality ingredient.

Note: as of today, processed barley by-product (partially hydrolysed barley) is now categorised as a novel food pursuant to Regulation (EU) 2015/2283 https://efsa.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.2903/j.efsa.2023.8064 

- The solution -

Co-Manufacturer Mapping and Plant Setup

Agilery engaged in an  initial mapping where we identified 110 potential co-manufacturers in Switzerland for processing barley malt from breweries. Then we created a shortlist of 50 companies that were capable of drying, pressing, and optionally grinding BSG (brewers spent grain).  By refined the potential partners further, filtering only those who are available, geographically accessible and with fair price, we got 12 partners expressing interest. From those two milling partners were suggested for a production trial.

We helped finding the most appropriate logistic solution and transportation barrels for the raw BSG. 

As a next step we went with our client in depth into the processing methods. From detailed plant blueprint and hazard analysis, we were able to identify opportunities where we could turn the ingredient quality from feed to food. By removing potential contamination moments during processing we could make the equipment and the production microbially and chemically safe. 

The whole project has been successfully done online via Teams, which even more reduced client costs and helped accelerating their project. 

As of today, Proseed initiated the second collaboration with Agilery to accelerate development and manufacturing of new food products using the newly created BSG ingredient. 

- Success factors -