TUFUCOL: Turn Fungi potentials into a COLorful future

The global market for colorants is projected to reach €86.76 billion by 2030, with the majority of these colorants derived from non-renewable petroleum. The production process of synthetic colorants and its residuals can cause significant problems to environment and health. In light of these concerns, there is growing interest in natural colorants as a sustainable alternative. Fungal colorants are one of the promising candidates. Historically fungal colorants have been used for various purposes. However, the industrial productivity, scalability, and application possibilities of fungal colorants are yet to be fully explored. Many Dutch small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are particularly interested in fungal colorants, but the limitation of experiences and knowledge in these novel products creates a gap among research, commodity, and markets. To fill this gap, it is essential to explore fungal colorant production from both technical and economic angles. This means a multidisciplinary approach would be needed including fermentation yield improvements, extraction upscaling and application discovery. These approaches require specific expert knowledge and facilities which are not easily accessible to SMEs. Therefore, by combining the expertise of 2 universities of applied sciences, 1 academic institute, 8 SME and 2 branch organizations, the TUFUCOL consortium proposes to conduct sets of studies contributing to fungal colorant industrialization in this project. The consortium will focus on blue and orange colorants produced by two different fungi as prototypes, and will conduct scaling-up and non-food application tests in industrial settings.The results will help to estimate the technological and economic potential of fungal colorants as a sustainable alternative to current synthetic sources. The development of a prototype fungal colorant business case could benefit achieving the climate neutral goal by reducing the reliance on non-renewable resources and reducing environmental pollution. This will contribute to the transition towards a circular economy.