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Byproducts, Waste May Lure New Industries
Posted 12/9/2009
CEDAR RAPIDS (The Gazette) - One company’s waste can be another’s raw material. When ingredient company J. Rettenmaier & Sohne of Rosenberg, Germany, was considering U.S. sites for a plant, Cedar Rapids rose to the top because of its abundant supply of oat hulls.
For many of its 136 years, Quaker Oats considered oat hulls — 308 million pounds produced annually — to be waste for a landfill.
The same was true at National Oats — now Ralston Foods — in northeast Cedar Rapids. Today, J. Rettenmaier uses 30 million pounds of oat hulls annually from Quaker Oats to make a dietary fiber food ingredient. If you’ve eaten a taco at Taco Bell, you’ve consumed oat fiber made at J. Rettenmaier’s southwest Cedar Rapids plant.
A recent study by students at the University of Iowa Henry B. Tippie College of Business found that byproducts or waste from food and bioproduct processing in the Corridor could be the raw material to attract new industries, jobs and capital investment to this area.
Frank Rydzewski, a Tippie College lecturer in marketing, said Corridor companies’ waste includes 12 of the 32 raw materials used by the $16 billion pet food industry.
“Since the waste streams are comprised of edible and highly nutritious foods, the pet food industry naturally lent itself as a potential target for new business formation,” Rydzewski said.
The pet industry is a big part of the business the Cargill soybean processing plants attract in northeast and southwest Cedar Rapids.
“We supply all kinds of ingredients for pet food applications — including aquatic food — and there’s certainly room for that to grow,” Paul Kerr, the plants’ manager, said.
Mark Seckman, president of Priority One in Cedar Rapids, said companies decide whether to locate in a community because of access to raw materials, market and geographic location. Priority One is using the UI study to recruit bioproduct and food processing industries to the Corridor.
“If we’re meeting with a company that needs distillers dried grains as its raw material, there’s not a better location in the world than Cedar Rapids.” Seckman said. “We can put them right next to the Archer Daniels Midland plant and pipe that material to them.” That’s what happened when Lesaffre et Cie — a privately owned Lille, France, company that has specialized in yeast products worldwide since 1853 — began a joint venture with ADM to produce yeast in Cedar Rapids.
Red Star Yeast, which is next to ADM, uses high fructose corn syrup instead of molasses to manufacture ingredients for the baking industry, human and animal nutritional supplements and the fuel ethanol industry. The need for additional corn syrup also created additional demand at ADM for 15,000 bushels of corn per day — enough to fill 15 semi-trailer trucks.
Seckman noted that Bio Springer, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lesaffre, decided in 2007 to locate a plant next to Red Star Yeast. “Bio Springer will use Red Star’s yeast to produce yeast extract,” he said. “That will lead to an expansion of yeast capacity at Red Star.” The new $540 million ADM ethanol plant will produce a large quantity of dried distillers grains. Thomas Reed, a consultant and former president of Penford Products who has worked with Rydzewski on the byproducts and waste study, said the same protein from dried distillers grains used to feed cattle could be a solution to world hunger and malnutrition.
“This creates an opportunity for other people to come here, look at that source of high protein, and convert it into food product for the underdeveloped countries of the world,” Reed said. “We will have an abundant supply of protein.”
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