Brief

AVEBE is the world's largest producer of potato starch and starch derivatives for food, feed, paper, building, textiles and adhesives industries. Solanic, the protein business unit of AVEBE, approached Upfront in order to develop a process that could isolate more than 10,000 tonnes per year of high value functional proteins from the side-stream of potato starch production for use in food and healthcare. The project will be the world's biggest industrial protein chromatography installation by far.

Objectives

• To develop a customised process for capture of functional proteins from the side-stream of AVEBE's potato starch production
• Meet the defined goals for yield, purity within the desired production goals for a pilot study
• Once the criteria have been achieved, scale-up of the adsorption process to isolate more than 1,000 tonnes per year and transfer this process to AVEBE

Methods

• Feasibility study was performed to identify suitable adsorbents, through screening of Upfront's in-house adsorbent library, for capture of specific functional proteins
• From these, the best performing adsorbent was selected for further process optimisation
• The adsorption process steps were optimised, including buffer composition and pH conditions, to ensure that the final process developed would combine maximum efficiency with the economies required for large-scale production
• A pilot study was undertaken onsite at AVEBE to process 1000 litres of raw material each day. Successful implementation of the study included extensive technical support and training to transfer the process to AVEBE

Results

• The pilot study met all agreed objectives with respect to targets for yield and purity within the desired production goals
• Following the success of the pilot study, AVEBE will be working with Upfront to scale-up the process to isolate more than 1,000 tonnes of functional proteins per year in the short term and up to 10,000 tonnes per year within a few years
• AVEBE and Upfront have entered a license and supply agreement