Greencovery – the circular food ingredient company

Biobased – Tasty snacks, powered by extracted ingredients from side-streams of the food industry? That’s smart food production in the biobased economy. Greencovery B.V. is a start-up from Wageningen, East Netherlands, producing valuable and high quality food ingredients using an in-house developed upcycling method. 

Biobased circular economy

Greencovery obtains the ingredients from low-value liquid side-streams from food companies. These streams are up to be discarded or have low value as animal feed. The initial focus of this startup is to recover the valuable compounds from these streams (e.g. organic acids, amino acids) to be used as ingredients in the food industry (e.g. natural banana flavour), An inspirational example of a green, bio-based solution that fits within the circular bio-economy.

Dr. Carlos Cabrera, co-founder and inventor of the technology of Greencovery:

“My dream is to contribute to a waste-free future. I am passionate about bringing sustainable technology innovations to implementation”.

INTERREG – FOOD2020

The first kilos of a circular banana flavour were produced within the INTERREG project FOOD2020.

This natural product is developed together with its first customer, Axxence Aromatic GmbH, an ingredient company from Emmerich, Germany.

“This application reduces 60% of the CO2 footprint of the ingredient in comparison with the traditional manufacturing and transportation”

Cabrera enthusiastically explains.

“Greencovery enables the next step in Smart Food Production: recycling and upcycling valuable ingredients in food production in a more effective way than any of the other technologies in the market. I love when we use science and technology to solve customer problems and global issues”

according to Juan Cajiao, co-founder and commercial director of Greencovery.

Greencovery has a three-step approach:

1. Analysing and identifying which valuable ingredient can be recovered from the side-stream of a food company and in which quantities, together with a market & economic feasibility scan. This will help to understand the size of the opportunity.
2. The production process is piloted at a demo scale to better understand the specific recovery process needed.
3. Design and plan the industrial scale of the solution to start the smart food (ingredient) production.

Farm to Fork for a greener Europe

Cabrera concludes that

“Side- and waste streams are hiding a huge potential of high value ingredients. Greencovery would like to work with food companies across Europe and world-wide to unravel the potential of nature.”

“We work together with several partners such as Wageningen University and Research and FoodValley NL to bring together this solution to different markets. This strategy is in line with Europe’s Farm to Fork strategy, to build a greener Europe.”

For more information, visit: greencovery.com