What if the leftovers from food production could help make food healthier? That is the question behind C2BIOTICS, one of the winners of the first ECIV Open Call. The project turns acetate-rich side streams from the agro-food sector into ingredients that support gut health and wellbeing. We spoke to Vicente López, Innovation Manager at the Centro Nacional de Energías Renovables (CENER), who represents the C2BIOTICS consortium, to find out more about the project.
What sparked the idea behind this project?
The idea arose from combining two challenges. On the one hand, many industrial side streams from the agro-food sector contain acetic acid or acetate but are still underused or treated as low-value residues. On the other hand, most microbial and biotic ingredients are produced using virgin sugar-based feedstocks.
CENER had already developed an acetate-fed fermentation process capable of producing different biotic fractions. C2BIOTICS was therefore conceived to demonstrate that acetate-rich side streams can become circular carbon sources for producing higher-value prebiotic, probiotic, postbiotic, parabiotic and synbiotic ingredients.
How did the partnership come together?
The consortium was built to cover the full value chain across three ECIV regions.
- Ecovinal, in Navarra, provides expertise in acetate-rich agro-food streams and feedstock characterisation.
- CENER develops and scales the patent-backed acetate-fed fermentation process.
- University of Navarra evaluates the biological functionality of the resulting ingredients through multi-omics analyses and staged validation using C. elegans and mouse models.
- Van Hall Larenstein University of Applied Sciences, in the Northern Netherlands, integrates the most promising ingredients into relevant food matrices and develops food-grade prototypes.
- Actalia, in Normandie, leads safety validation, shelf-life assessment and preparation of the safety and techno-economic evidence needed for future market uptake.
This complementary structure allows the project to connect circular feedstocks, biotechnology, health-related evidence, food applications and safety within one interregional value chain.
What would success look like if everything goes according to plan?
Success would mean demonstrating a robust and scalable process, progressing from pilot-scale development to TRL7, and producing a diversified portfolio of biotic ingredients from circular acetate-rich feedstocks.
The most promising ingredients would be supported by biological, multi-omics and safety evidence, validated in two or three representative food matrices and, where feasible, converted into food-grade prototype products.
From a broader perspective, success would also mean reducing dependence on virgin sugars, creating a higher-value use for agro-food side streams and delivering a replicable model that other European regions could adopt.
What makes the project unique?
C2BIOTICS is unique because it does not focus only on producing one microbial ingredient. It combines a patent-backed acetate-fed fermentation platform with a cascaded product strategy capable of generating several categories of biotics from the same process.
It also integrates technologies and expertise that are usually addressed separately: circular feedstock qualification, fermentation scale-up, multi-omics and in vivo efficacy assessment, food-grade application, safety-by-design and market-readiness analysis.
This makes C2BIOTICS both a biotechnology project and an interregional circular-economy demonstrator, linking industrial symbiosis with the development of ingredients intended for healthier and more sustainable food systems.
Follow the journey
C2BIOTICS shows what the ECIV Open Call is meant to enable: partners from different regions combining their strengths to turn circular ideas into real-world solutions. Learn more about all the winning projects here.
