Green Spot Technologies has developed an innovative solid-state fermentation process that converts large amounts of fruit and vegetable side-streams from the food processing industry into high-value-added ingredients. These ingredients are nutritious, functional and cost efficient for the food industry. These are a range of flours that can replace different ingredients bringing sustainability and cost efficiency while keeping technical and organoleptic functionality.
For the continuation of Green Spot development, a set of work packages were carried out and the preliminary results were achieved and are presented below:
1. The development of a methodology for screening, identifying, testing, and validating new strains for fermenting substrates derived from co-products from the food industry.
2. Another important development was to be able to highlight the applications and benefits of using them in standard and/or innovative products to our potential clients. Several applications were selected to test and analyze some market segments and the potential of our first range of ingredients. From these, Green Spot Technologies worked on the compatibility of ingredients’ granulometry with the type of applications: liquid and semi-liquid, soft and dry. Some applications were used to display the impact of ingredients’ granulometry on the perception in the mouth and to evaluate if the granulometry was adapted or not.
3. In the same way, the gluten-free and vegan markets are in expansion the past few years. However, they faced some problems in formulating a final product as good, and nutritious as the conventional product on the market. Indeed gluten-free formulations are challenged in terms of color, taste, and moistness and vegan ones look for a better texture, nutrition, and taste. Thanks to Ferment’up flours (Green Spot’ first range of ingredients) we can propose solutions to the industries that aim to develop these two markets. All of our ingredients are plant-based, therefore can be used in vegan/vegetarian applications. Ferment'Up Apple and Ferment'Up Tomato are directed to the gluten-free market and Ferment'Up Spent Grain to the vegan market. At the same time based on first feedbacks additional work was done to develop other market segments, which represented a market-fit for the additional ingredients that were developed.
4. Lastly, the ambition of the industrial demonstration plant was to set up a production frame to support the increase of production capacity in a representative environment. The first goal was to create an environment adapted to Green Spot’ activity, to install all the equipment, and adjust an environment to be able to follow and report the activity. After 6 months of operational running, the management system was tested and the preparation for capacity increase with the relevant tools was carried out and validated at the first phase of Green Spot demonstration plant.
