COVER STOR ▶▶▶Y
Converting organic residues into fatty acids
Amsterdam-based company ChainCraft has developed a fermentation technology to produce fatty acids from fruit and vegetables residues. After a decade of developing this biobased innovation, the company is scaling up and is now ready to serve the animal feed market.
ChainCraft pro- duces mainly Caproic acid (C6), which is known for its an- imal health promoting properties.
BY MARIEKE PLOEGMAKERS W
hen you arrive at the impressive production fa- cility of ChainCraft in the port of Amsterdam, it’s clear that the company has passed the start-up phase and is now ready to serve the
market. It all started at Wageningen UR, at the university labo- ratory where a fermentation technology was invented to
convert organic residues into fatty acids. Niels van Stralen, founder and director of Chaincraft explains: “In 2010 we got the opportunity to acquire the patent protecting the technology from the university. That was when Chaincraft was founded. Af- ter further developing the process on a lab scale, we were able to scale up the process to a pilot plant in 2014 with the help of venture-capital investors. During 2015 we produced a few thousand kilos of fatty acids and we started testing the product in animal feed trials.” The product proved promising both in terms of animal health and performance. With these results the company was ready to further scale up to a commercial demonstration factory and enter the animal feed market. In the current factory, 20,000 tons of organic residues can be pro- cessed into 2,000 tons of a C2-C8 fatty acid mixture.
Sustainable alternative The company mainly produces Caproic acid (C6), which is known for its animal health promoting properties. For in- stance, it improves the animal’s gut health and thus reduces the need for antibiotics. C6 acid is currently made from palm kernel oil. According to Van Stralen, organic residues are a sig- nificantly more sustainable source. “C6 availability in the mar- ket is still relatively poor, but it has very interesting and rele- vant properties for various types of livestock. Palm kernel oil
22 ▶ ALL ABOUT FEED | Volume 28, No. 7, 2020
PHOTOS:CHAINCRAFT
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