Technological Offer

CREAS offers diverse services for the productive sector, providing solutions to the problems in the agribusiness — and therefore closing competitive gaps in the regional and national industry.

In CREAS, entrepreneurs, SMEs, consolidated companies, and organizations from the public and/or private sector will find a management team with comprehensive knowledge about the needs of the food industry, specialized in designing, formulating, and technically and administratively managing projects with innovative components.

Our professionals have wide and comprehensive knowledge about the different tools and platforms, both public and international, which cofinance the execution of R&D&i projects, such as CORFO, FIA or CONICYT. Furthermore, since it is a CORFO Registered Center, CREAS’ actions are facilitated as it can enter into R&D contracts under Law No. 20,241 related to tax incentives to Research and Development investments.

CREAS has professionals trained in healthier product development, and it has suitable infrastructure with two pilot plants and cutting-edge equipment to develop new or improved food products and/or ingredients and nutraceutics. The installed capacity at CREAS allows scaling processes or technologies from their initial or laboratory stage up to a pilot project scale, with validated prototypes.

In each of these stages or scales, small samples of the new product or ingredient are created, which are called ‘food prototype’, which value lies on materializing an initial idea, providing an excellent opportunity for the regional and national productive sector in order to:

Assess sensory and commercial acceptability of new products.
Make decisions in terms of future investments.
Enhance customer and/or investor seeking.
Apply for public grants.
Produce with commercial purposes, while the entrepreneur becomes independent with his/her own processing plant.

Although Food Biotechnology is applied across products and project development, it is worth noting we have an expert team on this area among our professionals. In terms of Food Biotechnology, CREAS notes R&D&i project development applying bioprocesses such as:

Enzyme Engineering

CREAS has technical capabilities with plenty of experience in enzymatic technology. CREAS has improved its abilities to develop and execute high-technology projects applying enzymes in order to solve problems and/or opportunities detected in the productive sector. This area is committed to analyze, design, and operate processes using these bio-catalyzers — whether to encourage clean technology usage; improve products, performance, and/or efficiency of processes; or allow transformations that would be otherwise impossible without enzymes.

Cell Cultures

Fermented food is one of the big trends in the current food market. Knowing physical-chemical and microbiological processes involved in a fermentation process — such as the features of the microorganisms involved in the process, their way of growth, stages of fermentation, culture and engineering strategies, among other aspects — is key to develop technology focused on the food industry, since many products in the market today are produced through fermentation processes, such as yogurt, cheese, farinaceous products, beer, fermented drinks, yeast, vinegar, sauerkraut, among others. CREAS has a vast experience in developing and executing projects applying cell culture principles to develop food biotechnology aimed to optimize and improve already existent processes, or just designing and starting new fermentation processes.

Processes in General

CREAS has developed and executed R&D&i projects involving work with different types of technology, such as: Extracting and recovering bioactive compounds; producing essential and non-conventional oils; producing farinaceous, gluten-free and regular food; developing snacks; process line for dehydrated and powder ingredients; freeze drying; among others.

CREAS has experienced professionals in developing methodologies to perform sensory assessment on food, through a simple general public acceptability test, or through formation of trained panels. Sensory Assessment studies have become a powerful tool in order to validate the prototypes being developed with commercial purposes.

Sensory Assessment studies have become a powerful tool in order to validate the prototypes being developed with commercial purposes.

CREAS has professional analysts and biotechnologists, in addition to specialized laboratories to perform non-conventional analyses on food, going beyond the proximate analysis required for nutrition facts labeling.

These are aimed to assess different functions of the products being develop and/or measure specific compounds, such as polyphenolic profile, anthocyanins, vitamins, anti-oxidant activity, dietary fiber, amino acid profile, among others.