In the catering industry, refined cooking oils (those that have undergone a process to remove lower-boiling-point impurities) are used and re-used in frying. Despite the refining process, high temperatures cause the oils to oxidize, creating polar compounds that degrade the oil’s taste, quality and health benefits, requiring the oil to be replaced. Now, the startup company OFS Lipid Legends GmbH (Vienna, Austria; www.lipid-legends.com/en) has developed a process for introducing natural compounds into cold-pressed edible oils to resist oxidation and provide a longer-lasting alternative to refined cooking oil. The process can also extend shelf life of oils and improve health benefits without requiring external additives that could affect taste.
The conventional process for producing the oils (such as sunflower, rapeseed and flaxseed oils), involves pressing the seeds to collect the oil. This action leaves a press cake, which has been utilized as livestock feed or crop fertilizer. Analysis of press cakes has revealed several natural antioxidant compounds that are both nutritionally valuable for humans, and effective at reducing oxidation reactions that degrade the oils.
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Lipid Legends, a spin-off company from the laboratory of company founder Marc Pignitter, a food chemistry professor at the University of Vienna (www.unvie.ac.at), has developed patent-pending process steps that transfer specific antioxidant compounds from the press cake to the oil. “By carefully controlling process conditions, such as pressure, temperature and time, and using the oil itself as an extraction solvent, we can selectively transfer desirable antioxidant compounds (such as healthy polyphenols) to the oil without introducing any species that affect the oil’s taste negatively,” explains Pignitter.
The process, which involves solid-liquid extraction, centrifugation and filtration, raises the heat stability of the oils by 50% and consumes one-fifth the energy of a conventional process for refining food oils, Pignitter says.
The company is setting up a pilot system to scale up the process for sunflower and rapeseed oils. Lipid Legends has previously released a longer-shelf-life flaxseed oil product. Among the focuses for the pilot project will be reducing the cost of production for the enhanced oils.