Project

Call for Partners | Food2Food 2.0

Food loss and waste remains a challenging inefficiency in food systems. More sustainable and circular food systems require, next to FLW prevention, total use of the produced food materials. With side streams and discarded, often wasted, food materials not within focus of many companies, decision support on what to do with the unavoidable losses will increase total use of the materials and result in better use of all resources involved.

Complementary to research on obtaining valuable components or fractions from side stream material, research is needed to support more integral company decision making on this topic. This is especially challenging for SMEs, often lacking sufficient capacity to explore alternative destinations for side streams and, among more, the implications for the handling of this material.

Wageningen Food & Biobased Research developed an in-house tool, the Procestimator, to design and analyse valorisation options for side streams. From side stream characteristics, current use of the material and valorisation option the Procestimator is used to create a process design, it’s costs and impacts and most cost and impact determining factors. The tool allows for easy scenario analyses, such as effect of volumes, process settings and yields. Total use is incorporated by determining possible uses of newly occurring side streams and by including waste management.

The most promising valorisation options are supported with small scale experiments to validate effects of technologies on side streams, to determine end product properties and to do application development. Especially on application development, we cooperate with universities of applied sciences (Van Hall Larenstein and Hanze) in this project. With technology partners upscaling to pilot scale for production of test batches can be in scope of the project. And possibilities to work together on site with students and researchers from the universities of applied sciences.

Project approach

In this project we follow this 3 stage approach:

  1. Options: what is possible with the side streams of interest? WFBR experts determine alternative use of the material and costs and impacts are determined with the Procestimator.
  2. Support: the most promising valorization options are supported with lab scale experiments to validate the process design on effects of processing on the material and yields. Application development is executed on material available from the small scale experiments. Both in close collaboration with the universities of applied sciences.
  3. Pilots: identified challenges for upscaling are researched and pilot scale production of test batches for the most interesting applications are realised.

Invitation to join

We welcome companies with side streams and technology providers to join our public- private partnership at WFBR. We are looking for companies who want to reduce costs of waste management and are looking for options to improve the sustainability of their operations.