Alfa Laval supports ScaleUp Bio in advancing Singapore’s next-gen food goals

Alfa Laval’s separation and membrane technologies are at the centre of a food revolution in Singapore as the country seeks to future-proof its supplies through a major national campaign.

As a nation that currently imports 90% of its food requirements, the Government is urgently seeking to drive-up home-produced supplies to protect itself against climatic and geopolitical turbulence.

The ambitious 30 by 30 initiative – with the goal to produce 30% of the population’s nutritional needs by 2030 – is backed by a number of B2B enterprises looking to provide innovative solutions, including contract development and manufacturing organization ScaleUp Bio.

Their business model is to provide state-of-the-art facilities, expertise, experience and essential services on a fee-for-service basis to start-ups and established companies seeking to develop new food innovations from lab to commercial-scale operations.

To that end, they have developed two food-grade precision-fermentation facilities in the new, high-tech manufacturing district of Tuas, one offering customers the equipment with fermentation capacities between 100 and 10,000 litres, the other being a research and development centre.

With such a high-stakes food production project, ScaleUp Bio turned to Alfa Laval to provide the world-class high-speed separation and membrane technology to power the operations.




In the first, the Pureferm 250 high-speed separator is fully hermetic, reducing energy consumption by 40% and can be run to deliver continuous or intermittent solids removal, while the MultiSystem membrane filtration system offers the flexibility that is vital for an enterprise such as this.

Alfa Laval’s global head of Next-generation Food, VP Johan Agrell explains: “ScaleUp Bio needs versatility in their downstream processing, and they saw the potential in Alfa Laval’s MultiSystem membrane filtration system to deliver a unit that could operate from pilot scale up to commercial scale, depending on requirements.”

Meanwhile in the R&D facility, Alfa Laval will supply an MBPX404 separation system and two PilotUnit Multi systems, the latter having the versatility to test all kinds of products for microfiltration, ultrafiltration, nanofiltration and reverse osmosis in batch or semi-batch mode.

“These are the first such projects in Asia and will serve as an incredible gateway to market for Alfa Laval to promote our separation and membrane technology while gathering meaningful insights into new precision fermentation processes and applications,” says Johan.

“The beauty of this industry is that there is so much potential. We don’t yet know the full extent of what it can achieve, but it is exciting to be a part of this drive to increase the stability and sustainability of future food production.”

Aaron Yeo, General Manager at ScaleUp Bio, says: “Partnering with Alfa Laval to accelerate the development of this dynamic and promising industry has been invaluable in resolving bottlenecks for the next food revolution through submerge microbial fermentation. I look forward to our continued partnership.”

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