Systematic design and evaluation of protein ingredient production concepts from food processing side-streams

摘要

Large amount of concepts can be considered rapidly with process engineering approaches to give supporting data for business decision making already in explorative R&D phases. The example presented illustrates how 70 concepts were identified and assessed to come up with economically most promising and technically possible new protein ingredient concepts. Important for successful implementation of such methods is that the objective of the assessment is clear, all alternatives are considered, and for guaranteeing comparability, same experimental procedures and computational methods and assumptions are applied. The winning concept can be a result of iterative development between process engineering evaluations and experimental work. From the case example it is clear that for ingredient concept design, many product property based objectives may need consideration in technical viability check and in defining the market value of the products: protein content is not the only value in such an ingredient. By-product volumes may be significant and valorising that stream is one of the defining factors for economically feasible overall concept.