Friday, March 29, 2024

Plant protein an option for dairy?

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New Zealand dairy factories could pivot to produce plant proteins alongside dairy proteins, but will need assistance from the arable sector to achieve it.
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Speaking at the American Dairy Science Association’s annual meeting via Zoom, AgResearch scientist Simon Loveday said factories could potentially make these proteins during the winter months when milk production was low due to cows being dried off.

In a schematic of how it could work, the arable sector would firstly have to process the plant protein to remove its fat content before being shipped to a dairy factory. 

This is because the dairy industry did not contain the hardware required to do this. 

Oil seed and other plant proteins high in oil and lipid content require defatting before its protein can be successfully removed.

The most protein-rich crops are legumes, oilseeds and cereals, and each has different protein chemistry makeup and needs to be processed differently.

The protein meal could then be shipped to the dairy factory where its protein content could be extracted, producing protein isolate and concentrate, starch and fibre.

These factories had excess capacity in the winter months, raising the question of whether that capacity could be utilised to create plant protein.

The plant protein industry was also growing fast, worth US$21.23 billion.

“There could be an opportunity for some profitable pivoting there,” he said, and it would require the dairy and arable sectors to partner together for it to work.

The ‘poster child’ for plant protein extraction is soy, the vast majority of soybeans processed for oil and stock feed. Only a tiny portion was processed for human foods.

However, the soybean’s pre-processing stage and oil and meal extraction process used different machinery to what is typically used in a dairy factory.

But there was similar hardware used in factories that isolated plant proteins and those that produced acid casein in a dairy factory.

“The question of whether it could be done in a dairy factory – those first two stages of pre-processing and defatting – probably not,” he said.

While protein extraction using acid, alkali or salt was a maybe, protein concentration using isoelectric precipitation or ultrafiltration and drying and packaging the protein could all possibly be done at a dairy factory.

But, he says, this hypothetical situation posed other questions.

“Would food safety regulations permit plant materials to be processed in a dairy factory? Could those secondary streams of starch and fibre be processed on existing dairy hardware and would it be profitable?” he asked.

“The answer, I don’t know.”

Plant protein solubility was extremely variable compared to dairy proteins, which tended to be highly soluble.

“This points to the fact that the functionality of the ingredients is very dependent on the process and the crop and we can modulate functionality by our choice of processing,” he said.

NZ’s largest dairy processor Fonterra said in a statement it had no plans to process these proteins in its off-peak times

“While we have no current plans to process plant proteins in our factories, we are always open to exploring opportunities in future if they are of value to the co-op and our owners,” it said.

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