Knip Scales JUV Production to 165,000-Liter Fermentation Vessels

We’ve moved JUV production from 60,000-liter to 165,000-liter fermentation vessels, roughly tripling the maximum batch size available to us. The vessels are already running routine commercial production, and recent batches are meeting the same release specifications we hold at smaller scale. That last point matters more than the volume increase itself: bigger vessels are only useful if the product coming out of them is identical to what our customers already trust.

This is our third full-scale technology transfer, and each one has taught us something the last one didn’t. Vessel geometry, mixing behavior, and heat removal don’t scale linearly with volume, so the aeration and agitation strategies that work at 60,000 liters have to be re-optimized, not simply carried over, at 165,000 liters. Because JUV is produced from a proprietary organism, a meaningful part of that re-optimization work has to be done ourselves rather than handed entirely to a manufacturing partner.

We reached this scale through a contract manufacturing partnership rather than by building or financing our own fermentation facility. JUV runs on industry-standard aerobic liquid fermentation equipment, followed by centrifugation and spray drying to produce the finished ingredient. Because we’re not dependent on custom-built reactors, we can scale through our manufacturing partner network as demand grows, without the capital outlay of a dedicated plant. Our new partner brings roughly 10,000 tons of available capacity, well ahead of where our commercial volumes are today, which gives us real runway to support larger contracts as they come in.

Practically, this means we can now support larger commercial orders, for both existing aquaculture customers and the livestock and companion animal segments we’re expanding into, without a production bottleneck standing in the way.

We’ll keep sharing these scale-up milestones as we hit them. For the full technical detail on how we approached this transfer, Aquafeed.com covered it here.