CONVERTING the entire Western Australian lupin crop into an eco-friendly, plant-based protein - it may seem a blue sky concept, but Wide Open Agriculture (WOA) is one step closer to that dream after officially opening its pilot production facility last Friday.
The pilot facility, which was designed in conjunction with Curtin University, will produce a breakthrough protein - named Buntine Protein - which can be used as a key ingredient for plant-based food and beverage products for global markets.
According to the Grain Industry Association of Western Australia, the State last year produced about 780,000 tonnes of lupins and this year it has estimated farmers have planted 275,00 hectares to the crop.
While WA dominates global production of Australian sweet lupin, with about 60 to 80 per cent of global production being exported from the State, it had previously been used mainly as animal feed stock and a regenerative crop.
Use of the crop in the food sector had been restricted due to its taste and texture, as well as its capacity for gelling and thickening, however WOA's new technology has overcome those challenges.
The novel technology unfolds the constituent protein in lupin to increase its ability to blend and mix with other food ingredients, allowing the protein to become suitable for new applications in the food and beverage sector.
WOA managing director Ben Cole said while lots of amazing crops and agricultural commodities were grown in WA, they identified early on that three were best produced using regenerative farming systems - livestock, oats and lupins.
With meat and oat milk (OatUP) already on the shelves under the Dirty Clean Food brand, lupin was next on the to-do list.
"Lupin is amazing in its ability to sequester nitrogen into soil, it's a great break crop and it's something which we just grow really well in WA," Dr Cole said.
"We're standing on the shoulder of giants - people have done amazing breeding and agronomy work and the farmers themselves are constantly innovating to improve yields.
"We do it so well in WA and we produce the world's monopoly of it, so it made sense to convert it into a plant-based protein - which is the fastest moving category in food and drink right now."
According to a report by Bloomberg abIntelligence, the plant-based food market was worth US$30 billion in 2020.
To put that in perspective, the global market for lithium is worth US$4b and while that is tipped to double to US$8b by 2030, plant-based food is projected to reach $160b.
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WOA has ambitions to become a major part of that market by transforming as much of WA's lupin crops into plant-based protein as possible.
"As a hypothetical idea, if one day we were to convert the entire current WA lupin crop to Buntine Protein, it would be worth upwards of $1b in sales per year," said WOA founding chairman Anthony Maslin.
"This would represent only a small fraction of the global plant-based market, but one of WA's largest export products.
"And unlike some of the State's biggest resource-based exports, lupin is an annual crop and won't run out."
The technology itself works by milling lupin seeds into a flour, mixing that with water and applying an extraction process which changes the pH enough to pull the protein away from the fibre, after which a fast spinning machine then splits the two apart.
What remains is a protein slurry which goes through a process - for which WOA owns the intellectual property - which unfolds the protein to just the right amount, after which it's dried, leaving behind an off-white protein powder.
Dirty Clean Food chief executive officer Jay Albany said with the pilot plant officially up and running, the company first plans to blend the protein powder with its OatUP product.
"That will make the protein levels in the oat milk equivalent to that of standard cows' milk and also add a mouth feel which makes it thicker and creamer," Mr Albany said.
"More importantly, we will do it in a way which uses two crops grown in the same region, as part of a holistic rotation, naturally, instead of using synthetic additions.
Other alternative dairy products are also on the cards, such as yogurt, butter and mayonnaise.
As well as creating their own products, WOA has already signed a supply agreement with one of Australia's biggest food and beverage companies, Monde Nissin Australia (MNA) - the owner of leading food and beverage brands Nudie, Black Swan, Peckish and Wattle Valley.
In response to the growing plant-based foods sector, MNA will use Buntine Protein as the main ingredient to develop various products for the Australian market.
While the pilot plant may have only just been opened, WOA has already turned its attention to creating a commercial scale plant which would be able to produce in the range of 10,000t per annum.
"The demand is large and we're confident we could fill the order books," Mr Albany said.
"The challenge now is financing and scaling the technology to make sure it works on that larger scale."
Development of the commercial scale facility is tipped to begin next year.