Bioindustrial

Overview

The AURI Bioindustrial Team works with entrepreneurs, farmers, cooperatives, and businesses to transform ideas into commercially viable products and sustainable businesses. 

We are a team of scientists, engineers, and business developers that work at the intersection of science and business to turn agricultural feedstocks, biomass, and coproduct streams into market-ready solutions with a focus on coproduct valorization, biobased products, and biogas.  

Our team offers businesses commercialization support, hands-on technical assistance, pilot-scale services, including pelleting/densification, decortication, dewatering, drying, product characterization, biomethane potential, anaerobic digestion fermentation, and pairs it with business feasibility and techno-economic assessments to advance commercial opportunities that replace petroleum-based ingredients with agricultural feedstocks for new bioindustrial products.

 We also conduct public initiatives to address shared challenges and opportunities across the bioindustrial sector.  

Whether you are just getting started or scaling production, AURI has a range of tools and expertise to support your efforts to help you move forward with confidence.  We can help reduce input risk before making capital investments, use our insights to translate lab concepts and prototypes into repeatable processes, assist in creating product for future customers, and help build business cases with clear assumptions.  

You can meet our team, explore bios, and learn more about our facilities, research reports, and activities at our industry solutions pages for biogas, biobased products, and coproducts. 

Services

AURI provides free services and research results to support entrepreneurs.  Early-stage opportunities are addressed through public-domain applied research. This research is designed to derisk emerging opportunities and identify technical and market barriers. Such research might include evaluating novel uses for agricultural residues, coproducts, or regionally important emerging crops along with guides and roadmaps to advance industry opportunities. See examples below.

• On-farm Anaerobic Digestion Guide
• Industrial Hemp Roadmap

AURI provides individualized support to businesses with fee-for-service expertise to accelerate product development and process improvements, as well as market feasibility insights.  

The following links provide information and steps to work with us: 

• AURI Bioindustrial Brochure 
• Bioindustrial Innovation Center  
• Chemical Laboratories 
• Request a Free Consult or our Online Application 

Additional information on services is available under each industry solution area.  

• Coproducts
• Biobased Products
• Biogas

Business Development

AURI’s commercialization services are designed to help farmers, entrepreneurs, and small- to medium-sized businesses introduce new products or scale market opportunities.  Business development staff support businesses with several activities to better understand value-chain considerations as they enter the marketplace, such as: 

• Value proposition 
• Go-to-market strategy
• Feedstock availability 
• Manufacturing readiness 
• Distribution complexities 
• Regulatory requirements 

The business development team focuses on translating scientific and technical data points into marketable and commercial realities.  AURI can assist businesses in:

• Market feasibility 
• Techno-economic assessments
• Market readiness 
• Identifying potential value-chain partners
• Channel considerations 
• Financial viability 
• Cost reductions
• Referrals

With decades of experience across food, biobased products, and biomass-based renewable energy, AURI’s commercialization support can both accelerate outcomes and help avoid common mistakes.  

The team works closely with AURI’s scientists to provide a holistic viewpoint and translation that integrates various AURI and industry resources to help make informed decisions about the market opportunity.

Scientific Technical Assistance 

AURI’s technical support services are aimed at early- to mid-stage agricultural innovators who lack large, dedicated internal R&D infrastructure or specialized technical expertise and are exploring new value-added uses for agricultural products. Technical staff support value-added agricultural businesses with activities such as:

• Food product and process development, including formulation, bench-scale testing, nutritional label development, shelf-life assessment, advisory services on regulatory compliance and food safety, and packaging considerations
• Materials and product characterization and testing
• A full suite of analytical services
• Guidance on scale-up, equipment selection, feasibility assessment, techno-economic analysis, gap analysis, and connections to relevant technical, industry, and academic resource networks

AURI’s technical work is supported by specialized laboratories located at its Marshall and Waseca facilities.  

• The Waseca facility, known as the Bioindustrial Innovation Center, also features a client innovation bay, where client-specific piloting and processing activities can be conducted, complementing AURI’s equipment with client-owned or rented equipment. 
• The Marshall facility features an analytical chemistry laboratory and a preparatory and synthetic chemistry laboratory. 

Technical activities carried out by AURI include:

• A full suite of anaerobic digestion testing and services, from feedstock characterization and biomethane potential assessment to pilot processing at the thousands-of-gallons scale
• Fermentation assessment and testing
• Biomass drying, milling, blending, separation, and densification
• Decortication for fiber separation and preparation
• Chemical characterization of feedstocks and products by a variety of analytical methods
• Assessment of feed properties and characteristics of coproducts and other residues
• Analytical and preparatory chemistry labs
• Applied biology lab
• Biomass processing lab
• FDA-inspected grains and oilseeds processing lab

In addition, AURI’s staff works closely with clients and partners to design tailored technical support and development pathways that integrate AURI’s resources with external capabilities, ensuring that evolving client needs are effectively addressed.