Technology to ensure the commercial feasibility of new food products
GEA New Food Application & Technology Center of Excellence
A cell cultivation and fermentation pilot line to fast-track innovations from the lab to commercial-scale manufacturing.
The New Food Application and Technology Center of Excellence (ATC) has been established as a central hub to support innovation in the emerging field of cellular agriculture. Located in Europe and North America, these facilities offer leading edge bioreactor and precision fermentation and allocated upstream and downstream technologies in a highly flexible, pilot scale setup, so you can trial and evaluate fermentation and cell cultivation processes, and work towards scale up.
Supported by decades of GEA expertise
To help industry fast track process development for a wide potential range of new food applications, we have established the dedicated GEA New Food Application and Technology Center of Excellence. Sited in Germany and the U.S., these engineering and knowledge hub give you the opportunity to come and work with our application and technology experts to prototype new processes for cellular agriculture on our flexible modular, pilot-scale processing line.
The ATC gives you the opportunity to evaluate at a translatable pilot scale, processes for manufacturing new foods and offers you the flexibility to test production using cell culture and microbial fermentation, with 50–500 liter bioreactor/fermenter equipment, linked with upstream and downstream process stages.
In addition to bioprocess operations, the Janesville test center offers a wide variety of options to test UHT configurations to optimize customer processes with general beverage systems. Through efficient and gentle heat treatment options (indirect, direct), liquid of varying viscosities, and with sensitive components can be heat treated on-site, and packaged with an aseptic bag filler to retain product for further quality characterization. These equipment offerings support the alternative beverage industry, and can allow for shelf-stable storage, providing flexibility in distribution chains, reducing food waste, and extending shelf life.
No CAPEX and low OPEX
Work with us at the ATC and there are no capital or other investment costs. We’ll help you to generate true proof of concept for your processes and support a business model for scale-up to commercial cell- and microbial-based manufacturing of food products or nutritional components.
Scaling up from lab bench to industrial manufacturing
Whatever the final product – whether a cultivated meat derived from bovine cells, or a metabolite produced by precision fermentation in recombinant organisms – the development of any cellular agriculture process will start at bench scale, using laboratory equipment that produces perhaps just a few liters or less of broth, with a low product yield. Early work is focused on demonstrating experimentally that the recipe and process can support cell growth and manufacture of the desired end product.
However, even the most promising results at bench scale cannot be taken as a guarantee that the process will scale up to allow economically viable commercial-scale production. Cells grown in a lab setting won’t necessarily perform the same as they will in industrial-scale process lines that are designed to produce, sustainably and with high yield, hundreds of kilos of product.
So, industrial manufacturing may prove to be uneconomical if, for example, the yield at commercial scale is too low, growth is too slow, the organism is unable to cope with industrial stresses, the costs associated with resource and energy use are too high, or downstream processing is inefficient. If the relevant challenges aren’t addressed, the end product may just be too expensive for consumers.
Understanding your cells and processes
Importantly, our fermenter/bioreactor units can be set up for aerobic and anaerobic cultivation, or fermentation reactions, using just about any cell type. The platform also offers the potential to test the requirement for and/or level of heat treatment, and evaluate different gassing and feeding strategies, so you can really get to understand how your cells behave, and how to reduce the risk of contamination between batches and – when switching recipes – cell types and processes.
Using our equipment you can find the optimal process sequence by monitoring cell conditions and performing mass balances at each stage, evaluating reproducibility between batches and final yields, and looking at where efficiencies may be lost or gained. You can then modify parameters, or even swap the order of different stages to improve the process and troubleshoot. We believe that our highly versatile, user-friendly, and easy-to-configure bioreactor/fermentation line will offer up a world of possibilities for new feasibility studies and allow you to gain valuable expertise in processes and production to transfer in house. And, unlike testing at lab scale, pilot scale manufacturing at the ATC will likely give you sufficient product to take forward for downstream process testing – for example spray or freeze drying.
It’s our aim to help you derive successful processes, so you can generate a solid business model for future investment in product development.
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