“Over the course of six months, we developed an idea to upcycle waste from the food industry with a focus on innovation in food processing. We chose to address the problem of brewer’s spent grain, the insoluble parts of malted barley that make up the majority of waste from the beer industry and are currently used for animal feed or go to waste. We realized that this waste product contains high levels of dietary fibre, and new research from Portugal has developed a procedure to extract and purify the fibre. Our proposed solution involves scaling up the extraction process to transform large quantities of brewer’s spent grain into purified insoluble fibre to be sold to food manufacturers for use in products like granola bars, breads, and other foods.

It was a great experience to try to apply sustainability and processing topics to real issues in the food industry, and it was also very interesting to see what the other teams had come up with during the final presentations. In the end, our team took third place and the other FIPDes team took second! This team was working on biodegradable cups made of brewers’ spent grain.

Thanks to Food Factory 4 Us for giving us the opportunity to participate in this competition!”