Production, formulation and consumer testing of an organic extract of waste bananas which boosts the efficiency of distilling and brewing fermentations

Lytegro makes Baclyte - a patent-protected extract from waste bananas which sends bacteria and yeast crazy. It increases end product yield for distillers by over 20% and halves the amount of yeast or reduces the time needed to produce beer. This project will facilitate the production of samples of our Propagreater product (a 5x concentrate of a common yeast culture media and Baclyte) which is used as a simple supplement to treat brewing or distilling yeast prior to its addition to the production fermentation. These samples will then be trialled at full-scale by 5 UK distillers and 5 UK breweries to determine the scalability of the effects that we have seen with Propagreater at laboratory-scale.

Successful trials will result in Lytegro generating precious end-user validation data which can be used to enhance our patent portfolio and will hopefully lead to us gaining our first commercial orders from the companies that are participating in our trials. We project that users can generate £1m profits for every £200k of Baclyte purchased - this project will help to demonstrate and quantify these economic benefits for future marketing of our Propagreater product.

The Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) reported that there are 1.4 million edible bananas thrown away daily in the UK - which accounts for 83,000 tonnes of avoidable waste. By extracting value from and in reducing this waste stream we will see less material go into landfill. In the near future we expect to be using our Baclyte waste banana extract to increase the efficiency and speed of anaerobic digestion - a sustainable process for deriving value from waste biomass by generating green energy and reducing organic landfill waste.