PectCof is the producer of “Dutch Gum®”, a food emulsifier and stabilizer that is based on pectin and proteins extracted from coffee pulp. The idea for PecCcof was born back in 2011 at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Rudi Dieleman and 3 other students presented their idea of using coffee pulp as a functional food ingredient in a student competition. They won the competition, received a loan from the business incubator StartLife, and founded PecCcof in 2012.
Four years later, Rudi was the only one left; the company's coffers were empty, and he kept himself and the company afloat with part-time jobs. Two business angels finally came to his aid, and their investments helped him to develop the necessary technology to produce a marketable product. At the end of 2021, two venture capital firms joined forces with PectCof, which as of the end of 2024, is doing another round of financing.
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure to talk with Rudi Dieleman, the “survivor” and driving force behind a company on a mission.
Rudi, when you and your fellow campaigners founded PectCof in 2012, it was quite early stages for the very idea of upcycling a coffee by-product. What gave you the initial idea at that time?
It was early stages, absolutely! One of my colleagues at Wageningen University at that time, Andres, is from Colombia. His family has an analytical laboratory in Bogota where a client one day asked for a coffee pulp analysis. Well, the pulp didn’t contain the specific phenolic compound the client was looking for, but Andres saw some interesting spikes in the spectrum that he kept in mind. He didn't know what kind of compounds these spikes might have represented, maybe proteins, maybe polyphenols, but he said to us: “Guys, we could do something with that”; and as the biomass of Colombian coffee production is huge, we imagined that this could be something economically and environmentally viable – whatever it turns out to be at the end. That's how it started, very basic. Eventually we pitched the “pectin from coffee” idea and gave birth to PectCof. But as we had to finish our studies, it was not before the beginning of 2016 that we run PectCof full-time.
So, your idea was to extract pectin from the coffee pulp?
Right, it started with pectin; it was one of the spikes that I mentioned before. Now it's mainly pectin and a small part of proteins and other components; but unlike in the early days, we see ourselves now as more of a biorefinery technology developer. The reason behind this is that we also want to extract natural colours, fruit sugars, natural caffeine, water binding fibers, antioxidants and other things from the pulp.
Who actually develops your biorefinery technology?
Andres is the “godfather” of the technology; he also wrote our patents. Over the years we have been fine-tuning it quite a bit, because we’ve gradually built up a lot of know-how. We still do a lot of analysis and we work closely together with Wageningen University, especially with their food chemistry, food processing and food quality departments. We are also part of development groups to get the best understanding of what we have and what we can do with it, how we can apply our products and how to put it to the market.
Let’s switch from the technical to the biochemical part of your business. Does pectin from coffee pulp have the same properties as pectin from apples or citrus fruits?
No, it has different functionalities. It gels, yes, but not as well as pectin from apples and citrus fruits. And because of that we developed the brand name Dutch Gum®. In the mind of our customers, gums are more related to emulsification and stabilization, which is an alternative to gelling, the main function of pectin. Dutch Gum® is our first product, but there are more to come. The sales of Dutch Gum® will help us to further develop our biorefinery technology which will lead to the creation of new products.
What would be a typical application of Dutch Gum®?
Currently we are focused on three applications: plant-based ice cream, high protein bars, and vitamin gummies. We use it as an emulsifier/stabilizer (first extract) and binder/texturizer (second extract) instead of a gelling agent. It will basically substitute LBG, the “Locust Bean Gum”, which is an extract from the seeds of the carob tree and a widely used stabilizing agent in the food industry.
Dutch Gum® consists of…?
... 75% fiber, including the pectin fraction, 7% protein, 3% sugars as well as some polyphenols, minerals and moisture.
And the advantage of Dutch Gum® over LBG is…?
One advantage is that it provides a better melting profile in ice creams, for example; the ice cream melts more slowly compared to the current additives on the market.
We also see a flavour enhancing ability. For instance, let's take an ice cream with strawberry flavour, with or without additional strawberry fruits. Adding Dutch Gum® boosts the strawberry flavour, which gives you a better tasting ice cream. A manufacturer can now decide if he or she wants to have a more flavourful ice cream or the same flavour as before, but with reduced costs because he can add less flavour. Cacao, as you know, is very expensive at the moment. We are running experiments right now, and we already see a flavour enhancement there too. We now try to figure the savings you could make e.g. as a chocolate producer without compromising the flavour of your chocolate product.
As a manufacturer of ice cream or chocolate, would those savings outweigh the cost of having to buy your new Dutch Gum®?
In our opinion, yes! But there is something else. 70 or 80% of LBG is produced in the Mediterranean region, mainly Italy, Spain, Portugal, but due to Real Estate activities we see a decrease in the number of carob trees, which means a slow but steady reduction in the LBG supply. This means, it has to be replaced by something else…
Can the Dutch Gum® be used in drinks or juices too?
Absolutely! For instance, it can stabilize fibers. Take an unfiltered orange juice; the fibers always settle at the bottom of the bottle. If you stabilize them in the matrix, each sip would have the same amount of fibre. In drinks where you have water and flavour-bearing oils like in a Fanta (yes, Fanta has oil-based flavours!), the protein emulsifies the oil and the pectin stabilizes the oil throughout the drink.
And all this with extracted pectin and protein from coffee pulp! That's great news! But mentioning the pulp: which kind of pulp do you use to make your Dutch Gum®?
We use the dried pulp from wet processed Arabica coffees. We start the drying process right away after pulping. When the drying is done, we grind the pulp, pack it up, and ship it. We don't use the husk or biomass from natural process coffees because of its degradation; enzymes are breaking down the molecular structure during the drying out in the sunlight. That yields a raw material that’s not suitable for our extraction.
Talking about drying: proper, food grade drying of the wet pulp is crucial for your purposes. How do you manage this step?
In Colombia and Costa Rica, we use “Guardiolas”, the mechanical drum type of dryers. They work very well for the pulp too. However, we use them only at the beginning and the end of the harvest season because in between, during the peak season, they are needed for drying the parchment coffee.
The drying of the pulp itself is much faster than the drying of parchment coffee, which means we need much less fuel. We dry the pulp down to less than 10% moisture content, and depending on indicators like temperature and volume, the drying time varies; but it is always below 24 hours. A nice side effect is that at the end of the process the drums are cleaner than after drying parchment coffee!
Drying the wet pulp in “Guardiolas” is a new thing to do, at least to my knowledge. Are there any challenges?
There are some, sure! The main challenge though is education. Most mills or co-ops haven't done this before, so lots of talks and discussions are needed. As our knowledge grows too, it's actually a mutual learning process.
How do you find your pulp suppliers?
That's the easiest part of all: people reach out to us! We then start the process to see if we can collaborate. One of the many factors besides food safety, having reliable partners and such, is volume. For instance, to run our demonstration plant we need 350 tons of pulp. For that we have to work with larger coffee producers or co-ops. The reason for this high volume is the ratio of pulp needed to produce the Dutch Gum®, which is 10:1.
What are further criteria in the selection of a valuable pulp for you?
We first check on the pectin and proteins. If those are high enough, we check for pesticides, heavy metals, and microorganisms and other contaminants to see if those levels are low enough. This is critical as we import the pulp to the EU. Without meeting the EU safety standards, we cannot import anything. We also make sure that we have a homogenous biomass.
How do you fix the price for the dried pulp, or in your words, the biomass?
We check with multiple suppliers; we analyze their samples, find out if they have the volume that we need, maybe 1 or 2 containers’ worth, and if we get a reasonable quote, we’ll make the contract. It's that easy.
I’m asking this question because there is still no quality/price correlation for cascara or dried pulp. There is no grading system, there are no cupping standards etc., things that are urgently needed for trading this new commodity.
I totally agree. Prices are all over the place. I have seen prices for pretty much the same quality level going for less than 1 dollar per kg up to several dollars per kg. The prices are really dependent on what the producer thinks his/her biomass is worth.
There are now also middlemen who buy the biomass from producers and sell it. This of course makes the raw material more expensive and consequently the final product too.
Do you think that upscaling by-products will actually bring additional income to coffee producers?
Definitely! Look, coffee trees bear cherries, not beans. The cherries are the crop! Why shouldn't a farmer get the value for his whole crop instead of only 20% of it?
The only thing that we have to keep in mind is the fact that there is not yet an established market for upcycled coffee by-products. But I'm optimistic.
And by drying the pulp, for instance, the coffee producer adds additional value to his/her crop.
Right! The farmer or the co-op adds value; we add value too; we want to get paid for our products, and the same applies to the farmer or co-op. It's very simple.
How important are the flavours of the dried pulp for you?
Actually, we have to get rid of flavours. From the perspective of product development, our products have to be odourless, tasteless, and very functional.
I see; because this makes it possible to add your Dutch Gum® to another food product without interfering with other flavours. But as your Dutch Gum® is an extract, does it have novel food status?
Yes! We are in the process with EFSA to get approval. We're already pretty far. I think by the end of the year, we will get the opinion from the scientific committee and then it might take another four to seven months to get the official approval. We just got the Self Affirmed GRAS, means the “Generally Recognized As Safe” status in the US a couple of months ago, so we can start selling our Dutch Gum® there. Within the EU we already have been sending samples to companies to test it in their food products.
If you would get a request for a huge amount of Dutch Gum® one day, could you produce it? Or would scaling up be a problem?
It wouldn't be a problem for us. We have actually already reached our capacity, and because of that we’ve outsourced a part of our production to a manufacturer in Eastern Europe. And that is something we continue to do. That's our strategy to deal with volume.
And you could do this for everything you want to extract in the future like colours, polyphenols, caffeine etc.?
Absolutely! We already did a couple of subsidized programs to check the feasibility of all of these side streams. I do have a complete picture of where to go first, what to do, which market is the right one for us, but for the moment we want to focus on the production and distribution of Dutch Gum®. We're a small team with a core of only five people.
Technically we are ready to move to the next step, but as you know, if you extract natural caffeine, water binding fiber or whatever from a new source like coffee pulp, it requires regulatory approval. You have to prove that your products are not a health risk, and this takes time and a lot of effort, even if the process is easier now that cascara as a whole is already approved in the EU, at least for limited uses in beverages. It's not easy to get a new food product or ingredient to the market.
If someone wants to visit you, where can he or she find you?
Well, there are three options. In The Netherlands I might be in one of our two locations: either in Venlo, where we have our main office and where we do the technology developments, or in Harlem, where we do the application development. Sometimes I´m also with our partner in Eastern Europe who is doing the production. It's not too complicated to find me…
Rudi, let's pause our discussion here and resume in 5 years! It would be super exciting to see what will happen in those years. Thank you so much for your time!
