Food productsValais start-up combats food waste with brewer's grains bread
SDA
19.12.2024 - 10:45
Brewing beer produces by-products. The start-up Proseed wants to utilize them. (archive image)
Keystone
The Valais start-up Proseed wants to reduce food waste with bread, pasta and chocolate made from by-products of the food industry. It has already won over its first customers, such as Coop. And co-founder Thomas Vogel has big plans for expansion.
Keystone-SDA
19.12.2024, 10:45
SDA
Since December, Proseed has been supplying Coop with the technology to dry spent grains, a by-product of beer production, or okara, a by-product of tofu production. This can be used to bake bread, for example. The taste: lightly toasted and similar to wholemeal bread, says Vogel in an interview with the news agency AWP.
He emphasizes the sustainability factor: "If we were to replace ten percent of the flour in every loaf of bread with spent grains, we could save ten percent of conventional grain." This would free up arable land that could be renatured or used for other purposes, says Vogel.
With its technology, the start-up is also tackling the problem of food waste in the industry: according to Proseed, eight million tons of spent grains are produced across Europe every year, which are processed into biogas or fed to animals. This reuse makes sense in principle, says Vogel, but given the effort involved in growing food, it is "insane not to recycle these proteins and fibers".
The start-up, which was founded in Sion in 2023, has raised two million francs in capital to date. The aim is to install several hundred drying machines at producers such as breweries and wineries worldwide. In addition to Coop, the Valaisanne brewery is also one of the first customers.
But the co-founder is far from satisfied with that. "We want to install several hundred containers worldwide. Each one could dry 4000 tons of by-products per year," he says.