Value Add From Food Waste Streams

Gratuk Technologies has combined extensive food manufacturing and pharmaceutical experience to create high value ingredients and products from common waste streams of agricultural and food processing. Traditionally, these waste streams have been a cost burden on industries because they must be disposed of in an environmentally sustainable manner. For many of the industries that Gratuk has worked with, this significantly impacts their profitability and constitutes a large portion of their production costs. Additionally, the waste of food processing often contains the majority of the nutritional content of the original plant source.

Stabilisation and characterisation of these potential ingredients is a significant technical challenge, however, in the western diet, the large proportion of highly processed foods mean that many individuals are paradoxically obese and malnourished at the same time. A significant opportunity exists to provide highly nutritious foods to supplement the western diet. Using Gratuk’s extensive expertise, several agricultural waste streams were identified that can use our proprietary processes to create highly nutritious, medical foods. These include grape marc from the wine industry, soy fibre from the tofu industry, fruit pulp from the juice industry and farm produce that is unsuitable for retail sale, a significant problem in itself.

There have been many failed commercialisation attempts in this space, due in large part because of the specificity of the equipment required. Gratuk has developed a process that will allow processing of multiple food stocks without significant capital equipment changes. Additionally, entering into the high-return, niche markets rather than low-value, bulk ingredients will provide a high return on investment. By partnering with farmers and manufacturers and either removing the cost of disposal or in some cases providing another source of income, Gratuk will add value to all parties involved as well as introducing high value products to the market that are environmentally friendly and Australian made. The project will create premium products, initially to reach profitability, however as many of these ingredients will be suitable for Gratuk’s medical and nutrition project, the potential for extremely high value therapeutics can be explored.

Current Status

This project has past proof of principal stage, as is actively seeking commercial partners.