GreenProtein demonstration plant is ready and operative

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Type of post: NEWS.

After 3 years of project development, the GreenProtein demonstration plant is ready and operative. This BBI JU project is aimed at producing high-added value, food-grade and fully functional proteins and other ingredients, out of vegetal residues (mainly, from sugar beet).
Press release: “GreenProtein General Assembly & DEMO Plant Part 2”, 30/10/2019.

Figure 1. GreenProtein demo plant

The project general assembly and the opening of the demo plant took place the 9th and 10th of October 2019. These were two significant events for the project and a big occasion to celebrate and share the progress. The host of the events was Royal Cosun, project coordinator.

The main outcome of GreenProtein will be the transformation of 4,000 tons of agricultural residue yearly into a high-quality dried RuBisCO powder ready to enter into food industry production chains as an alternative of the widely extended egg white preparations or whey protein. One important milestone in this process was the design and inplementation of specific equipment to establish a demonstration plant with capacity of 1,500 kg/hour of vegetable residue input, rendering 28 kg of dry RuBisCO. The GreenProtein demo plant has been built with a compact design, ready to be “plugged” to the production line, and so it is an easily replicable system with a high spreading projection in whole EU.


Ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase oxygenase, most commonly known by the shorter name RuBisCO, is an enzyme that catalyses the first major step of carbon fixation, a process by which atmospheric carbon dioxide and water are converted to energy-rich molecules such as glucose, using sunlight. In green parts of plants, the protein RuBisCO can make up to 50% of the total amount of the protein fraction. Thereby, RuBisCO is the key photosynthetic enzyme in green leaves of plants and is considered the most abundant protein present on earth. It is of potential interest for human consumption due to its high nutritional value. It contains high amounts of essential amino acids, which makes it rather unique among vegetable proteins.

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