ISSUE FOCUS FEED & ADDITIVE MAGAZINE October 2022 39 protein. Additionally, ProtonTM is produced from locally sourced ingredients and has no arable land requirements, reducing its carbon intensity by over 60% compared to conventional proteins. We typically see two main interests from our customers. The first and major one is reducing the carbon footprint of animal products by enabling lower carbon feeds. The second driver is self-sufficiency, an issue that has become more apparent over recent years due to geopolitics and complex supply chains. Customers want better security on their strategic flows, which is why we continue to invest in this field, as we believe our technology can help produce local, nutritious and sustainable protein. We believe investing in this field will significantly impact tackling the climate emergency and reducing the food industry’s impact on biodiversity loss without relying on drastic behavioural changes. You have recently developed Proton™, a single-cell protein for the feed industry. What is Proton™ and after what kind of work was it developed? ProtonTM is a dry, protein-rich ingredient for high-performance animal diets produced from microbes cultivated on clean and sustainable carbon dioxide. We create ProtonTM by cultivating non-GMO microbes in a controlled fermentation process. As the microbes are naturally occurring, most of the innovation has been developing an efficient and scalable process. We’ve built on the foundations of conventional fermentation processes, such as brewing beer or wine, though instead of using microbes that must be fed sugar, we use microbes that require carbon dioxide and hydrogen to grow. When our microbes grow, they accumulate high concentrations of protein, creating a milk-like broth. This broth is then dried into a powder, and that’s how ProtonTM is made. What do you promise to the animal nutrition industry with Proton™? ProtonTM will help feed producers effectively lower their carbon footprint across the entire value chain. We will build ProtonTM production plants near points of consumption, offering a reliable and local supply to end customers. Our use of clean and sustainable CO2 allows us to deliver a consistent, high-quality and fully traceable product that is available all year round, rather than being dependent on seasonality. Are there studies on the use of Proton™ in animal feed? If yes, could you give us some information about the results obtained? We’re slated to run feed trials with the University of Stirling and Nottingham Trent University as part of the end-to-end, value chain-wide REACT-FIRST consortium, a programme supported by grant funding from Innovate UK, the UK's Innovation Agency. The programme is set up to obtain critical data about the cost, digestibility, nutritional quality and carbon footprint of ProtonTM and is the first step towards the ingredient’s commercial development. Are you currently only making test production or have you started commercial production? I guess you have a production target of 100,000 tons in your facilities, how much can this meet the needs of the feed industry? We’re currently in the process of commissioning our Pilot Plant at Brightlands Chemelot in the Netherlands. Once live, the facility will be able to produce sufficient volumes of ProtonTM for application development, validate key process techno-economic factors at pilot scale and generate datasets required to inform the scale-up design of our planned commercial facilities.
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