Fruit loop: The circular process of making dairy alternatives from apricot kernels

IN Austria, one start-up has found an innovative way to reuse waste materials, namely fruit pits, in order to make new foods. The firm has focused on removing cyanide from fruit pits, in order to turn them into dairy alternatives like plant milk and ice cream.

Protein, minerals, fiber and even unsaturated fatty acids, it's amazing what you can find in the pits of certain fruits.

The cherry pit, for example, has a high level of anthocyanins, compounds that delay the aging of the skin, but also tocopherol, which has a protective effect on the cardiovascular system.

Despite these many beneficial properties for our health, more than 500,000 tons of fruit pits in Europe end up in the trash every year.

This is now the focus of an Austrian start-up that recently caused a sensation at BioFach, Nuremberg, a major organic food innovations fair in Germany.

Its business is based on the idea of recovering this waste and repurposing it in the food industry, in the form of oil, flour, or as a basis for making plant-based alternatives to dairy products.

Except that this circular approach is not so simple to implement, because some of these pits and kernels, in particular those of apricots, cherries and plums, contain cyanide.

And the risk of poisoning is real if ingested in large quantities and not processed correctly.

However, Kern Tec has succeeded in integrating these three types of raw material into its production process. The innovation lies in the capacity of the process to extract cyanide.

This process makes way for a new addition to the shelves of almond, oat or rice milks. These various plant milks are not made from extracts of the cereals in question, but from a mixture blended with water.

However, in the case of Kern Tec's plant milk, the approach is different, since it is the content of the pits -- minus the cyanide -- that makes it possible to develop the beverage.

This novelty was crowned with a prize at the FI Europe Innovation Awards in Germany. Last summer, the drink was joined by an ice cream made from apricot, cherry and plum pits.