Novel production of egg yolk oils and powders as nutraceuticals using subcritical fluid technology

World’s uncertainty and instability, e.g., the Covid-19 pandemic, have created far-reaching impacts to many sectors including egg industry. Both disruptions from external and internal factors have affects the demand and supply sides of the egg consumption and price fluctuation. The domestic sales of Ovo Foodtech (OVF) company limited, a leading egg producer of Thailand, has long been disturbed by the imbalance of the Thai egg value chain and recently been suffered from the Covid-19 crisis. The company’s pasteurized egg white liquid is well known to Thai market and heavily consumed by many local food factories. The local demand of the pasteurized egg yolk liquid, on the other hand, has been poor causing the liquidation problems. The company has been searching for an advanced technological invention to resolve this issue for many years to expand the market demands and create new values to the egg yolk liquid. OVF is committed to join force with the world-class innovation team (Asst.Prof.Dr. Aluck Thipayarat) to develop a novel egg yolk oil and cutting-edge extracting technology transforming low-price egg yolk into nutraceutical-grade gg yolk oil and high protein, fat-free egg yolk powder. The research team has already conducted a preliminary investigation using the lab-scale prototype (TRL 4) extractor and studying the antioxidant activities, total phenolic content, total flavonoids, fatty acid profile analysis and amino acid approximation. The existing knowledge has shown great potentials in terms of technological breakthrough and favorable market opportunity to enhance the egg business of OVF. With the current economical constraints, OVF deems appropriate to seek external research funding from Program Management Unit - C (PMU-C) to accelerate the pace of the commercialization of these high-potential products and process to equip Thai egg industry with a relevant and high-impact research and know-how. We are aiming to upgrade the egg yolk liquid to safe, high-nutrition, and high-quality egg yolk oil and powder to meet the international manufacturing standards for export. This proposal not only gears toward the nutraceutical industry but also to bring a better price stability to farmers, logistics, processors and consumers by creating a new value chain for Thai egg industry.