A large investment for Ilok’s major industry.
TRS is a cooperative whose primary activity revolves around the production of wine and the use of grape seeds as a raw material.
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 16th of April, 2018, the TRS Agricultural Cooperative from Ilok has designed a project that plans to utilise the potential of grape seeds as a raw material, and aims at finally putting three new products on the market – cold pressed grape seed oil, flour, and grape seed extract.
The cooperative from Eastern Croatia was originally oriented to only one product – wine. During the three years of grape processing in the winery, they found that about 200 tons of waste material in the form of grape seed that has been processed into humus and used as fertiliser for the vineyard had occurred. They got an idea themselves and are now attempting to produce something quite new out of this raw material.
They devised a project of a total value of 1.5 million kuna, of which the HAMAG-BICRO and the Ministry of Economy, Entrepreneurship and Crafts, through the European Regional Development Fund’s “Competitiveness and Cohesion” program, allocated a very welcome 1.1 million kuna in non-refundable funds.
The first step is the equipping of laboratories worth 160,000 kuna, through which the potential for the full utilisation of the seeds will take place, a process which will be assisted by the Faculty of Food Technology in Osijek.
As Martina Šaravanja, Project Manager at TRS pointed out, similar solutions already exist in Europe, but here in Croatia, no one currently applies such a principle when it comes to the processing of this useful raw material.
“We believe that this project will benefit not only the winery, but also the entire town of Ilok, which lives on viticulture, in solving the problems of waste disposal after grape processing, as well as opening up new jobs,” stated Šaravanja.
