IN Brief:
- BIO is providing ALSEC with $6 million in senior financing, alongside a further $3 million from AgriFI.
- A €3.1 million EU-supported TGVC guarantee backs the BIO transaction and reduces financing risk.
- The new Milsec plant will process whey into food and pharmaceutical ingredients using specialised European equipment.
ALSEC – Alimentos Secos is to build additional dairy processing capacity in Colombia through its Milsec project, converting whey from cheese production into proteins and other nutritional ingredients for food and pharmaceutical applications. The investment is being supported by $6 million of senior financing from Belgian development finance institution BIO and a further $3 million senior loan from the EU-funded AgriFI facility managed by EDFI Management Company.
BIO’s loan is backed by a €3.1 million guarantee through the Transforming Global Value Chains programme under the European Fund for Sustainable Development Plus, combining debt and risk-sharing instruments around a physical production project rather than a general corporate funding package. The financing will support construction of the new plant and a specialised processing line supplied and installed using European equipment and technologies.
Whey is generated in substantial volumes when milk proteins are separated during cheese manufacture, leaving a liquid stream that still contains lactose, soluble proteins, minerals, and other solids. Recovering those components can produce saleable ingredients, although the economics depend on collecting sufficient feedstock, preserving it before processing, concentrating valuable fractions efficiently, and meeting the compositional and microbiological specifications required by downstream customers.
ALSEC plans to source whey and milk from small and medium-sized cheese manufacturers and smallholder farmers, linking a relatively fragmented supply base to a central processing operation. EDFI says whey is still discarded into soil and waterways in parts of Colombia, where its high organic load can contribute to pollution, so the new plant is intended to create a commercial outlet for material that may otherwise carry a disposal cost.
Aggregation will be one of the less visible constraints around the project because dairy byproducts deteriorate quickly if they are not handled and chilled appropriately, leaving transport distance, collection frequency, storage, and incoming quality closely connected with final ingredient performance. A plant designed for consistent nutritional products cannot treat every load as equivalent when solids concentration, microbiological condition, acidity, or previous handling varies between supplying dairies.
The exact process configuration has not been disclosed, preventing assumptions about the individual separation, membrane, evaporation, or drying systems that will be installed, although the financing announcement confirms a dedicated European processing line and an intended output of whey-derived products and proteins. Food and pharmaceutical applications impose tighter consistency requirements than a disposal or low-value feed route, increasing the importance of process control, cleaning, traceability, and laboratory verification once the operation is commissioned.
Local ingredient production also changes the commercial role of the byproduct because value is created only when the processed material can compete with imported alternatives on specification, price, and reliability. EDFI says the project is expected to substitute ingredients currently imported into Colombia, which gives Milsec a market beyond environmental remediation but also leaves it exposed to international ingredient prices and the scale advantages enjoyed by established whey processors elsewhere.
Development finance is being used to bridge part of that investment risk, with the TGVC guarantee reducing BIO’s exposure while AgriFI supplies additional senior capital alongside it. The structure does not alter the production economics once the facility begins operating, but it can make the capital required for a specialised processing line available on terms that allow the project to proceed before its feedstock and sales network have reached the maturity of a long-established dairy ingredient business.
Relationships with smaller cheese producers could become more commercially important if the plant establishes reliable purchasing arrangements for whey that previously had little or negative value. Additional income at supplier level remains dependent on the collection model and commercial terms, although a regular industrial customer creates a different incentive from disposal, particularly where dairies have had to manage wastewater impacts themselves.
The environmental case will likewise depend on throughput rather than installed equipment, since a circular model produces little benefit if insufficient whey reaches the plant or if process losses create another concentrated waste stream downstream. Energy use, water consumption, cleaning requirements, product yield, and transport all sit within the final resource balance, leaving plant efficiency as part of the environmental performance rather than separate from it.
Milsec therefore combines dairy processing, ingredient manufacturing, and waste reduction within the same capital project, with European finance supporting the move from dispersed byproduct streams towards a central industrial process. Once commissioned, the more useful measure will be the volume of whey converted into saleable ingredients at specification, because that output will determine whether the environmental problem identified by the project’s backers has also become a durable commercial raw-material stream.
