Food and Nutraceutical Industry
The food and nutraceutical industry of today is searching for natural ingredients that are free from harmful substances. Supercritical-CO2 extraction has been established as a "green" and sustainable technology and represents an attractive alternative to traditional methods. Solvent-free products are key elements of health-promoting functional food and ingredients.
Pioneers in hygienic large-scale solutions
The most challenging requirement for CO2-based processes in the food industry is the large capacity. By building the biggest plants in the world and by continuously challenging the status quo, NATEX ensures the profitability of the processes. Increasing the size of a plant not only makes it more economical, but also more sustainable. This is achieved by installing advantageous CO2 recovery systems and energy optimization. Our extraction plants with hygienic design deliver the highest quality of extracts and comply with the current requirements of regulatory bodies. Organic certification plays an important role for the entire food and nutraceutical industry. By using CO2 organic certifications can be easily achieved.
Applications
- Defatting of foodstuff and removal of undesired substances
- Decaffeination of coffee and tea
- High-value special oils
- Hops and hemp extraction
- Flavours and aromas
- Antioxidants and essential oils
- Oleoresins, natural colors from spices and herbs
Traditionally consumers have set their focus mainly in the convenience and taste of the oils; this is changing nowadays, as the concerns for health and nutrition become more preeminent. The SCE technology has been successfully applied at industrial scale for the production of special vegetable oils with health benefits (e.g. sesame seed oil).
The SCE technology enables
- Extraction of oil seeds, the supercritical processing presents considerable advantages in comparison with the traditional cold pressing processing. On one hand it allows higher extraction yields (by cold pressing up to 12w% oil remains in the pressing cake, which means that 20-40w% valuable oil can be lost, by contrast, with SCE the oil in the residue can be reduced to less than 0.5w%), extraction can be carried out in a single step without aroma losses, the residues can be turned to high protein and more stable feedstock e.g.: walnuts, almonds and macadamia nuts;
- Extraction of oils from cereals, valuable oils can be recovered from cereal seeds or bran. Such oils are rich in TOCOS compounds (antioxidants) and the extracted germs can be used as additives to muesli or cereal bars since they have a long durability;
- Extraction of seeds and kern oils, e.g.: apricot, cherry and peach to be used in cosmetics and in food;
- Extraction of wood oils, these are valuable oils and have high boiling points requiring high temperatures for their recovery by steam distillation. The use of SCE allows working at lower temperatures (avoiding thermal degradation and hydrolysis) and overcoming the diffusion limitations.
