How Waste Valorisation Can Create Profitable Plant-Based Businesses

A three-year government-backed project led by the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland focused on the importance of creating value from every sidestream to build profitable plant-based businesses. The Rethink project, involving seven local food companies and backed by a €3M grant, developed ingredient processing solutions to demonstrate the value of using byproducts from plant protein manufacturing. The team emphasized the need for new ingredients, closer collaboration among companies, and value creation from every fraction of ingredients produced to achieve profitability in the plant-based sector.

The project highlighted the utilization of waste and emphasized the importance of collaboration among stakeholders in the food system to reduce supply risks and enable production to scale. The new solutions developed by VTT aimed at locally profitable production, manufacturing nutritionally valuable ingredients, and end products without complex processing. The research also led to advancements in technology commercialized by VTT spin-off Happy Plant Protein, which is reshaping the market with its production process and utilizing existing food industry infrastructure and local raw materials for international ambitions.