After 13 years, soy protein comes alive

Vancouver-based Burcon NutraScience will see its first product in commercial production this summer after 13 years of research and development of plant-based proteins.

U.S. food-processing giant Archer Daniels Midland is tooling a factory in Illinois to produce Burcon's Clarisoy 100 - a flavourless, odourless protein derived from soy beans - in commercial quantities for use in sports and recovery drinks.

The road to earning revenue has been bumpy. An agreement between ADM and Burcon to develop commercial applications for canola-based proteins Nutratein, Supertein and Puratein failed despite eight years of trying.

The development agreement with ADM for the canola-based proteins expires today.

But a 20-year licence agreement with ADM for Clarisoy signed last spring is ready to bear fruit, Burcon president Johann Tergesen said.

Clarisoy is the first Burcon product to go into commercial production.

Burcon will receive a percentage of revenue from ADM sales of Clarisoy as royalties beginning this year, after posting operating losses of $8.4 million, $6.6 million and $4.8 million over the past three years.

The company recorded just under $5 million in losses over the first nine months of its current fiscal year, leaving it with a cumulative deficit of $51.8 million.

Archer Daniels Midland is working with several "global" beverage companies to create protein-fortified drinks, according to ADM spokesperson Courtney Kingery .

The company confirmed that a new production facility is on schedule to produce commercial quantities of Clarisoy to be available this summer. ADM is providing sample size quantities to companies for product development.

ADM taste-tested a Clarisoy-fortified fruit drink at the Institute of Food Technologists trade show last summer and the product earned a nomination for a Food Ingredients Excellence Award, according to Kingery .

Clarisoy is a good fit for the beverage industry because it is water soluble, transparent and carries no "beany" taste. It is also heat stable and won't precipitate into solid particles in lowpH drinks, such as acidic fruit juices.

"(Clarisoy) is able to be used in a new group of products that soy protein has never reached before, such as sport drinks, lemonades and fruit juices," Kingery said.

Tergesen is convinced that Burcon is poised to benefit from a huge expansion in the production of functional foods - packaged foods that convey some health benefit.

"When you are looking at labels, protein is the one thing you want to see more of," Tergesen said.

Health-conscious consumers are avoiding additives and nutrients such as fat, sugar, salt and carbohydrates.

Burcon operates in a dark corner of the food business, invisible to most consumers. We know the big brand-name companies that make sports drinks. But who knows who makes the potassium citrate or the acacia gum that are among its ingredients?

Companies such as ADM manufacture the ingredients needed to make readyto-eat foods, while researchbased companies search for the processes to tease those ingredients from commodity crops such as corn and soy - and in Burcon's case, canola and now peas.

"We call it the subterranean world of food ingredients, because people just don't think about how massive that industry is on a global basis," he said.

Burcon's lab in Winnipeg is dedicated to developing processes for isolating protein from plant sources and until recently they were focused on canola. Canada is the world's leading producer of canola and the seed meal that is left after oil extraction is an inexpensive and incredibly abundant resource.

"Canola has been moved very much to the back burner," Tergesen said.

In addition to continued work with soy, Burcon is in talks with a partner to commercialize a pea-based protein it calls Peazazz.