The project
Microalgae As a Green source for Nutritional Ingredients for Food/Feed
and Ingredients for
Cosmetics by cost-Effective New Technologies
Goal
MAGNIFICENT aims to expand the range of commercial algae products and their market volume significantly and in a sustainable manner. The overall objective of the project is to develop and validate a sustainable and economically feasible new value chain based on cultivation and processing of microalgae, with the aim to transform microalgae biomass into valuable ingredients for food, aquafeed and cosmetics applications.
Cultivating microalgae
Microalgae are a promising raw material for sustainable production of food, feed and non-food products. Microalgae can be grown on land unsuitable for agriculture using seawater and CO2 from flue gas. Algal cultures have a high areal productivity, and the produced biomass is a rich source of proteins, oils, polysaccharides and other high-added value compounds including omega fatty acids, colourants, anti-oxidants, and other bioactive ingredients for a range of applications.
Today, algae are applied in a limited volume. To expand the application of algae in consumer products requires reduction of production costs, increase of the production scale and an enhancement of economic revenues through development of new products and applications. MAGNIFICENT addresses these challenges and capitalizes on the opportunities that algae offer.
Current status
Today there are only market opportunities for high value applications because the production costs are still too high to make microalgae a competitive feedstock for commodities. There is presently a large production capacity for a limited number of microalgae strains in Europe. However, the number of concrete products and market applications is still limited.
The enlargement of current market applications for high-value microalgae ingredients will lead to new business opportunities, industrialize the technology and provide the knowledge and experience required to enter the medium- low value market within 5-10 years.
How to achieve this?
The various steps in the production chain will be optimized. The cultivation of the microalgae will be improved by the selection of new, better performing algae varieties, by adaptation of the cultivation process to reach a higher concentration of valuable target products and by improvement of the extraction and purification processes. In this way the overall aim to maximise the production of compounds of interest can be achieved.
In the project the focus is on production of phospholipids rich in omega-3 fatty acids and fucoxanthin. Development and validation of new product formulations based on these compounds are included in the project. The work is supported by chain evaluation, market assessment, socio-economic impact assessment and Life Cycle Assessment. Specific attention is being paid to the requirements of the EU regulatory framework.
