I-Corps: Sustainable manufacturing of natural vanillin

Purdue University, West Lafayette IN

Investigators

Abstract

Production of high value chemicals from biomass is an area of increasing interest, especially in the Flavor and Fragrance industry where there is a growing demand for natural and sustainable products. This I-Corps team has developed processes to produce natural ferulate from non-food biomass. Natural ferulate is important to the Flavor and Fragrance Industry as it is used to produce the highly desired natural vanilla. Vanilla is one of the most important products sold in the Flavor and Fragrance Industry. The global flavor and fragrance chemicals market is a $20 billion industry with continuing annual growth rate of 4.3%. At the present time, vanilla represents around $1 billion of this global market with a 13,000 metric ton production volume. Naturally derived vanilla is an important segment of the market and constitutes 2,400 metric tons of this volume. Successful commercialization of this technology would provide a route for domestic production of renewable and sustainable natural vanillin from non-food biomass sources. This team has developed proprietary technologies for selective upgrading of wood lignin to high value chemicals used in the flavor and fragrance industries. A new application of this technology seeks to produce natural ferulate from biomass, while simultaneously working to better understand the customer needs through the I-Corps discovery process. The goal of the discovery process is to validate the hypothesis that natural ferulate produced from non-food biomass will be a valuable product desired by producers of natural vanillin. The scope of the project includes over 100 interviews with relevant industry contacts to test the hypothesis. Methods employed will focus on interviews with members of the entire value chain including; biomass suppliers, producers of ferulate and vanillin, flavor and fragrance compounders and formulators, and distributors. This discovery work will provide essential data and understanding as the project advances in the prototype stage. Prototype scale-up will be conducted through a combination of already constructed in-house reactors, and will also utilize toll manufacturing. Data from the prototype scale-up will be used in combination with the data generated through I-Corps interviews to provide great insight into the commercial viability of the proposed process and recommendations for further scaling.