1) The problem being addressed:
The innovation is a direct response to identified market need for radical improvement of the processing technologies in the production of high quality sparkling wine, which would head producers towards more efficient, effective and profitable production, allowing them to save time and costs and more efficiently respond to the growing demand for their high quality sparkling wines.
Producers of sparkling wine are currently confronted with a choice to produce either a) high volumes of low quality sparkling wine or b) lower volume of high quality sparkling wine. Although the global demand for high quality products is growing rapidly and the market price for high quality products on average reaches at least 5 times the price of low quality products, the production of high quality products is exposed to limited profitability as the producers are unable to respond to increasing every day demand. The key limiting factor in production of high quality sparkling wine is a rigid and time consuming process of removing the yeast sediment from the bottle, a mandatory step before the bottles can be shipped to the market. On top of that, the process requires implementation and maintenance of expensive separation equipment and carefully timed production of sufficient stock, to enable serving the annual peaks of demand. The later requires high spatial capacities for storing the finished products, leading to high additional costs of storage. The reduced ability to serve the day-to-day demand causes the producers of high quality sparkling wine to lose at least 30% of their potential sales.
2) Importance of the project
The latest trends on the sparkling wine market foresee a rising demand for high quality sparkling wines, which is bringing remarkable new opportunities to the producers. The shift in perception of sparkling wine from occasional and luxury to an everyday drink, increasing consumer awareness on the quality standards and rapid globalization of the market have driven the market to expand for 40% in only a decade. As the consumers are increasingly willing to spend larger share of their disposable income for more expensive, high quality wines, the particular growth is forseen for high quality sparkling wine market. However, the industry of high quality sparkling wine is confronted with a challenge to develop processing technologies, that would enable a more flexible, cost-efficient and simplified manufacturing process. The industry has been trying to tackle this challenges for a century, but has only been able to shorten the riddling time from 8 to approximatelly 1-2 weeks by introducing expensive riddling machinery in the early 1970s, which is still in use today. However, with the today’s rapid expansion of consumption, these challenges need to be resolved using more modern approach and fast.
MagYeast efficiently solves these challenges, by introducing the solution that:
1) requires only 30 minutes of time for separation (about 500 to 1000-times faster than the existing technologies),
2) is easy to apply to the production process, eliminating the need for a complex, multi-stage separation process and the need for implementation and maintenance of expensive separation equipment,
3) enables serving day-to-day demand instead of planning the production several months ahead and
4) lowers the overall production cost and increases profitability.
3) Overall objectives of the project
The main goal of the innovation project is to create added value for the producers of high quality sparkling wines, by introducing a novel processing technology for rapid separation of yeast. These challenges are common to all global producers of high quality sparkling wines. However, taking into account that 74% of the volume of world sparkling wine is produced in Europe, the project has a strong European dimension.
The overall objectives of the project are to verify feasibility of the project (Phase 1), fully develop (TRL9 - Phase 2) and commercialize MagYeast (Phase 3), which will significantly contribute to achieving InoVine’s strategy of becoming one of the World’s leading experts in the field of innovative processing solutions for the wine and beverage industry.
Main objective of SME-1 project was to assess technological, practical, market and economic feasibility of the MySpark project. The activities involved dedicated in-house assessments of the technical requirements and capacities, meetings with the suppliers of raw materials, used in production of MagYeast, on-site meetings with the sparkling wine producers, IPR specialists and other relevant stakeholders.
Business plan fundamentals have been proven to be correct by the work done in the action and required only minor modifications (previous section), therefore we will continue with the project.
