Project

Call for partners | PAWS: Probiotics for Animal Well-being and Sustainability

The project’s goal is to develop technology (probiotics, fermentation, downstream processing) capable of converting underutilized, resilient and low-value side-streams of plant-origin, into new, sustainable, high-value and healthy ingredients for feed and/or petfood. Different industrial actors from the AgriFood domain (e.g., dairy processing, animal feed supply, and animal feed ingredients) are brought together with the objective to create new value-chains with increased sustainability (total-use, less waste) and better profitability (increased side-stream value) to create new, healthy, plant-based feeds.

Processing of by-products/side-streams from the industry and the primary sector, with the aim to develop new valorization routes and reach a total-use concept, is an important field of development. Technologies such as fermentation are more-and-more employed in the production of feed and (pet)food ingredients. The microbially produced biomolecules or the microorganisms themselves (probiotics) provide health and functionality to the host, when grown on dedicated feedstocks selected for this purpose.  

In this project, the following topics are covered: 

  • the unique attributes of probiotics combined with fermentation will be used to predigest difficult/recalcitrant biomass from plant-based side-streams (with or without pretreatment), as these microbes have the ability to cope with variable and undefined substrates, as is the case with most AgriFood waste streams.
  • the fermented material will be tested in sophisticated (cellular) in vitro models of the gastrointestinal tract.
  • the processing of the material will be chosen in such a way that value is added. To match the properties of the fermentation product with the specifications of the feed ingredients, a lean downstream process will be designed,
  • the development of the new valorization routes will be performed in such a way that there is compliance with GMP+ regulations so that application is feed/petfood products can in principle be allowed. A techno-economic evaluation of the newly developed process will be set up to check economic viability and assess the sensitivity of the process.

Partners 

For this project, we’re looking for industrial partners from the entire value chain to join the consortium. Joining partners are expected to invest both in cash as well as in kind to successfully achieve to goals of this exiting project.