Where is the white space for innovation for manufacturing companies?

Plant protein is having an incredible potential for innovation. Starting from breading where it is possible to select plants having a better proteins composition (quantity and quality), a better process ability or less anti nutritional factors.  On the extraction and purification side it is possible to optimize processes using either dry (dehulling, milling, sieving, air classifying, electoseparation…) or wet process (wet milling, solubilizing, clarifying, fractionating with tangential filtration or chromatography, stabilizing in wet or dry form). We see more and more new development in proteins texturizing using different technologies to produce vegetal milks or cheese or creating meat like or tofu like products. On the application side, plant proteins can be integrated in many different food matrix for functional or nutritional purpose. This is why been able to characterize functional properties is so important (solubility, viscosity, foaming, gelling or emulsifying properties..). It is also necessary to determine the digestibility preferably using in vitro methods but also to characterize the organoleptic profile and to develop new formulation receiving high scoring from qualified sensory panels.

IMPROVE is having a very diversified list of technologies’ available in its pilot hall where it’s possible to work on any kind of plant material from seeds, leaves, roots, algae’s… starting from few grams up to few tons we can applied a huge diversity of process steps combination in order to defined optimized processing lines in terms of mass balance, utility balance and CAPEX. IMPROVE is also capable in its lab to characterized all the generated products starting form chemical composition, physical thermodynamical and functional properties, and also going to in vitro digestibility and sensorial characterisation.