Thanks to the strong EIT Food consortium Phenoliva, the Swiss ETH spin-off Gaia Technologies is close to achieving full circularity in the olive oil production.
The story of Phenoliva starts in 2015, when ETH mechanical engineer Claudio Reinhard discovers the large quantities of leftover waste (up to 80%) that is created in the production of olive oil. Back at ETH Zurich, he joined the Laboratory of Food Biochemistry led by Prof. Laura Nyström, to experiment and build on his discoveries with the vision to make the olive oil industry more sustainable and to create a fully integrated circular economy. The goal is to use all the side products in other ways so that no waste is discarded; the extraction of anti-oxidants from the residues being one the main innovations. In order to make this vision a reality, Prof. Nyström and Claudio Reinhard started looking for European partners to pool expertise from different disciplines and sectors, as interdisciplinarity is essential in circular economy.
Thanks to ETH Zurich’s membership in EIT Food, which is Europe’s largest knowledge and innovation community in the food sector, Claudio Reinhard could attend a match-making event of EIT Food in Turin in January 2019. At this event he established contact with all the partners that would then make up the Phenoliva consortium, consisting of eight partners from five European countries. Each partner has a clear role in the consortium: The Spanish research institute Instituto de la Grasa is responsible for the extraction of the anti-oxidants, the production of biogas from olive sidestreams and assessing the microbial properties of olive antioxidants, the Instituto de Agricultura Sostenible works on the use of agricultural residues to improve soil health, the Frauenhofer Institute is involved in product development and process optimisation, the food companies Acesur, Puratos and Maspex (together with its two subsidiaries Tymbark and Lubella) test the antioxidant extracts in their various products and support the product and business development, ETH Zurich is active in the planning, product and business development, the engineering designs, the regulatory questions while also coordinating the whole consortium. In the process, students of ETH and the different research institutes can also get involved and contribute to the research efforts. These partners submitted their project proposal ‘Phenoliva’ to EIT Food in April 2019 and were selected and funded to start their work in October 2019 already, ahead of schedule in order to be right in time for the olive harvest in the autumn of 2019.
The Phenoliva project has since been running very successfully. In October 2021, the project won the EIT Food Impact Prize in the category Circular Economy. In the same year, Professor Nyström and Claudio Reinhard decided to found the company Gaia Technologies to commercialise their innovation. The founders said that the support from EIT Food and creation of the Phenoliva consortium was essential on the path from idea to product. As the circular economy approach requires broad expertise from multiple disciplines, only this diverse group of research institutes, companies and academia could bring the project to fruition and towards market application. When it came to working with EIT Food, the dedicated programme manager responsible for Phenoliva was very helpful to support and accompany the project work and to deal with the administrative aspect of the project. It is noteworthy, that ETH Zurich could continue to be coordinator of the Phenoliva consortium despite the non-association of Switzerland to Erasmus+.
Based on the Phenoliva project, the start-up Gaia Technologies will continue to work towards commercialisation. The company is planning to set up a first production site in Andalusia by 2023 with its partners. In a first phase, they will focus on cosmetics as this sector is not as heavily regulated as the food sector and markets can therefore be accessed faster, while margins are much more attractive. The start-up company has also benefited from Innosuisse, the Swiss innovation agency the Start-Life Agrifoodtech Accelerator in Wageningen and the MassChallenge accelerator Switzerland.
This year 2022, Phenoliva is nominated for the EIT Awards (Innovators Award) which will be presented on 11 October 2022 at the EIT Summit in Brussels. A public voting is open until that date. The Swiss-led project is particularly relevant on the EU level as it contributes to the European Green Deal and its Farm to Fork strategy for greener and more sustainable agriculture and food production. Going forward, the Phenoliva project will come to a successful conclusion by the end of 2022 but will continue to revolutionise the olive oil sector in Europe as a private company.
“The Phenoliva project is an EIT Food innovation project funded by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), a body of the European Union.”
