Safe Preservatives from Mushrooms

Food-Safe Preservatives from Mushroom By-products

A collaboration between Pennotec and Bangor University in the development of food-safe preservatives from mushroom trimmings was supported by SMART Cymru.

Pennotec is seeking to become a producer and exporter of a range of high-quality natural and food-safe preservatives that are vegan-friendly to meet increasing consumer demand.

A sustainable source of vegan chitosans are mushroom stalks and trimmings, which are an unavoidable by-product of mushroom production, with mushroom farmers disposing of tens of tonnes of trimmings and associated compost every week.

The collaboration between Pennotec (Pennog Ltd) and the BioComposites Centre and the Centre for Environmental Biotechnology (Bangor University) developed environmentally sustainable methods for the preparation of high quality, food grade chitosans from mushroom trimmings. Through the application of sophisticated analytical techniques and expertise available at Bangor University, the Pennotec team confirmed their bio-refining techniques can produce chitosans that are free of traces of compost. In lab trials these chitosans have been shown to successfully preserve organic fruit.