Microwave technology core of deal to bring to market lower-cost food, beverage ingredients

09-Jun-2014 - Last updated on 10-Jun-2014 at 14:45 GMT

Radient has a 1,800-square-meter facility in Edmonton, Alberta

Botanical ingredient supplier Gencor has teamed with Canadian company Radient Technologies to bring to market a new array of natural compounds suitable for use as functional food, beverage and dietary supplement ingredients.

The new deal hinges on Radient’s technology. The company, based in Edmonton, Alberta, has developed a microwave technique—called Microwave Assisted Processing, or MAP—that can rapidly pull compounds of interest out of various feedstocks. The company says that it can process up to 800 kg a day of raw material to extract high value ingredients.

“We are going to concentrate on plant and marine extracts,” Jith Veeravalli, president of Gencor told FoodNavigator-USA. “There is a tremendous market for this.”

Veeravalli said Radient’s technology delivers something that up to now has been missing from the supply end of the market, and that is speed, and that advantage can be turned into profit.

“They are able to extract material from biomass at a much reduced cost becuse they can do the extaction much faster. Some extracts (using current technologies) could take two or three days to do. They are able to do it in 50 to 60 minutes,” Veeravalli said.

Faster, and better, too

And that speed will not mean a lower-quality finished product, he said. The technology can extract higher levels of bioactives from the feed stocks as well as doing it faster. Radient says it has had success with the techology in many categories of ingredients including lipids, proteins and phenolics. The company says its technology means that these ingredients can be extracted using less solvents, too.

Veeravalli said the Radient/Gencor partnership represents an opportunity to rapidly identify and exploit new herbal extracts; to significantly improve quality, processing time, and production costs for existing extracts; and ultimately, to reduce the time to market and cost of new and incumbent natural actives within the Gencor brand.

Veeravalli said Gencor, for its part, brings to the partnership a science-driven expertise in the development of natural ingredients and a distribution channel that reaches blue-chip and growth customers alike in 50 countries.

“In the last year there has been a lot of interest in this technology by nutraceutical formulators. We have a good customer base all over the world and we bring market knowledge to the partnership,” Veeravalli said.