IN Brief:
- Raisio has secured €1.8m from Business Finland for a four-year grain fibre innovation project.
- The company will add €2.7m of its own funding, taking the project value to €4.5m.
- The work will focus on functional fibre ingredients and production technologies from grain processing side streams.
Raisio has secured €1.8m from Business Finland for a four-year research and development project focused on functional fibre ingredients from grain processing side streams.
The Finnish food company will invest a further €2.7m in the initiative, bringing the total project value to €4.5m. The programme, titled Valorisation of Grain Sidestreams for Functional Fibres, will begin in 2026 and run until the end of 2029.
The project will focus on developing fibre ingredients that can deliver nutritional and technological benefits while improving the resource efficiency of grain processing. Raisio will scale up side-stream valorisation technologies at its new pilot plant at the Raisionkaari industrial site, which was completed earlier this year.
Commercial application work will sit alongside process development. The company will assess market opportunities for the resulting ingredients, giving the project a route beyond academic research and into product development, ingredient specification, and industrial production planning.
The funding forms part of a wider Finnish consortium involving 16 companies and research organisations working on sustainable bioeconomy projects. The combined projects are valued at around €12m and are linked to the Global Center for Sustainable Bioproducts network, connecting universities, research institutes, and industrial partners across Europe, North America, and Asia.
Grain side streams offer a useful raw material base for fibre development because they already sit inside established food processing systems. They can contain fractions with nutritional and functional value, but those fractions need to be separated, stabilised, processed, and specified before they can move into food-grade ingredient supply.
The pilot-plant element gives the programme its industrial weight. Side-stream valorisation can appear attractive at laboratory scale, but grain materials vary by crop, season, processing route, and storage condition. Scaling a process requires control over hygiene, drying, milling, extraction, separation, microbial stability, allergen management, and finished ingredient consistency.
Fibre has become a more valuable formulation tool as manufacturers look to improve nutrition while maintaining texture, shelf life, and eating quality. In bakery, cereal, snack, dairy alternative, meal, and nutrition applications, fibre can support gut-health positioning, satiety, structure, sugar reduction, and cleaner reformulation. The strongest ingredients are those that add nutritional value without forcing undesirable changes in taste, process behaviour, or finished-product stability.
Digital formulation systems are starting to raise the bar for ingredient documentation and application data. TraceGains’ Formula AI platform brings supplier intelligence, compliance, ingredient data, and collaborative product development into one workspace, reflecting the direction of travel for technical teams. New fibre ingredients will need to enter that environment with clear specifications, functional data, and regulatory confidence.
Application centres are moving in a similar direction. ADM’s Berlin flavour centre links sensory development with scalable formulation, showing how ingredient suppliers are increasingly expected to support developers through the practical work of building finished products. Raisio’s project begins further upstream, but the same commercial test applies: the ingredient has to perform inside real food systems.
European food manufacturers are also under pressure to reduce waste and extract more value from existing raw materials. Agricultural volatility, ingredient inflation, sustainability commitments, and margin pressure are making side-stream processing more commercially relevant. Turning by-products into functional ingredients can support resource efficiency, but only where the final material can compete on performance and cost.
Raisio’s programme gives grain fibre development a structured path through research, pilot processing, and commercial assessment. If the work produces ingredients with reliable nutritional and technical performance, it could strengthen the role of side-stream processing within mainstream ingredient strategy rather than leaving it as a peripheral sustainability project.
