N.S. food “micro-factory” funded

Nova Scotia Agricultural College will lead a project to develop and test a portable “micro-factory” to help small-scale food producers and processors get more value from their crops, with almost $1 million in federal funding.

The federal government announced $950,000 for the Atlantic BioVenture Centre project on Monday.

The micro-factory would be used to extract high-value ingredients for use in the nutraceutical, natural product and bioactives markets.

Bioactives are naturally occurring compounds from plants, animals or fish, such as omega-3 fatty acids from flax or beta-glucans from oats. Nutraceuticals are products isolated from foods and sold in medicinal (non-food) forms, as opposed to “functional foods” which by themselves are found to have health benefits or reduce the risk of certain diseases or conditions.

The test for the micro-factory will be to recover bioactives from wild blueberry and cranberry crop residue, left behind from the commercial juicing process and now generally either used as animal feed or treated as waste. The micro-factory would extract bioflavonoids and other nutraceuticals from the residue, which contains a “substantial portion” of those ingredients.

The Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island governments will each also invest $100,000 in the BioVenture Centre project, while industry partners will kick in $116,000 cash and $130,000 of in-kind contributions.