PURIS
If you could jump into a time machine and head back to rural Iowa in 1985, you might come across a seed salesman on a mission to build a more sustainable food system by putting more plants on peoples’ plates. Fast forward to today, the company he founded to foster that vision is now in its second generation and owns the entire value chain – from the seed to the grocery shelves.
Nick Manley, June 2024
In the mid-1980s, the challenge of feeding 10 billion people by the year 2050 was not yet a factor in our collective consciousness. But even back then, Jerry Lorenzen, along with his wife, Renee, recognized the importance of plants as a sustainable protein source. Focused on cultivating non-GMO crops and Earth-friendly farming, the pair started what is now the revolutionary company, PURIS.
PURIS is a company deeply rooted in building a sustainable food future. Founded with the progressive idea of growing more crops directly for human consumption rather than for feeding animals, PURIS has transformed plant-based food production. Their mission is to build a system that hinges on plant-based ingredients, uniting farmers, producers, and consumers in the pursuit of a more sustainable food landscape. This vertical integration spans the entire journey from farm to plate: cultivating partnerships with growers, transforming agricultural produce into high-quality ingredients, and further using those very ingredients to create food products found in grocery aisles and restaurants.
“What makes us unique is our focus on food,” explains Nicole Atchison, CEO of PURIS Holdings and daughter of the company’s founders. “We’re an agriculture company, and a lot of agriculture is focused on feed. Our focus is purely on food, starting at the crop level. We started nearly 40 years ago breeding soybeans, peas, and corn, all with the intention of creating food from them.”
Adding to their uniqueness is PURIS’s ability to take this breeding capability and have the system and the infrastructure in place to transform these crops into ingredients through grain processing, flour milling, protein processing, extrusion, and food formulations. In essence, they were taking these specialty crops from the fields and bringing them all the way to a customer’s plate, working with everyone from the small challenger brands seen at natural grocers to the biggest multinational consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies. “That vision is what my dad called ‘protein independence,’” Atchison explains. “But owning the entire supply chain from the field to the grocery store is not something that I would necessarily recommend. It is difficult. Every demand-supply-demand cycle that affects retailers and distribution centers, every drought and flood suffered by farmers, and everything in between – we are impacted by all of these.”
PURIS’s founders didn’t have much choice at the time as the industry and systems required simply didn’t exist in the 1980s and 90s. So, they decided to reimagine the system, which is characteristic of this company. From its mission to its business model to the brands and products it produces, everything about PURIS simply oozes innovation.
From the start, PURIS recognized that food products made from plants needed to taste good if they were going to become mainstream. To do that they needed to create a protein platform that was neutral in nature, allowing them and others to develop the products they wanted without having to deal with “off flavors” or other negative sensory impacts associated with some alternative proteins. They decided to focus on peas. It was clear that the only way to develop a pea protein platform was through conventional, or non-GMO breeding. This stands in stark contrast to most of the seed crops grown in the American Midwest, which are the result of GMO breeding and destined for animal feed. These natural non-GMO breeding techniques provide some transparency around the origins of the resulting food – which is of growing interest to consumers.
Similar to how bees do their work, pollen from one plant is combined with pollen from another, creating a child seed. By selecting varieties with specific traits, such as higher protein content or improved disease resistance, a seed that exhibits the desired characteristics is developed. This process is time intensive, and that’s where PURIS’s strengths lie. With their extensive expertise, they have become a reliable partner for those dedicated to incorporating natural processes into their food systems.
We gauge our success on two factors – safe people and safe food. A smooth-running operation is vital to achieve that success.
Matt Karels, Plant Manager at PURIS
Spending time with the team at the downtown Minneapolis PURIS headquarters, you get that start-up feeling – high energy and high creativity, brimming with ideas. But then you also realize they have nearly four decades of experience, education, and drive that propels them forward. It’s a formidable combination, and one that bodes well for our nutritional future.
Diving into the business a bit, you find PURIS produces wholesale, food service, and retail products. The ingredients business unit produces ingredients for business-to-business (B2B) distribution and is their largest channel. It’s this channel that is mostly responsible for PURIS’s ability to scale over the past 10 years. The primary product is their plant-based protein, but they also produce starch, fiber, and a liquid stream. The protein and starch products are sold to a wide variety of customers and range from industrial grade to food grade.
The fiber and liquid products are sold to the animal feed market. Then there’s AcreMade, the CPG-focused business unit that’s producing plant-based foods, primarily egg replacement, using PURIS ingredients and other ingredients for distribution in retail and food service work. This venture within the PURIS organization is near and dear to Atchison, who herself is allergic to eggs. “We started AcreMade to spur growth in the plant-based egg space, as well as introduce the use of pea protein to that market,” says Atchison. Before AcreMade, that market really consisted of only one entrant. The product is a good one, but the PURIS innovation team saw it as an opportunity to make a go of it themselves.
AcreMade brings a portfolio of products, which currently includes frozen patties, dry shelf stable goods, and plant-based meat products directly to consumers. While this part of the business is small in comparison to the ingredient side, the ambitions are similar. And the business model keeps the team close to the consumer, enabling them to get quick, valuable feedback from grocers, chefs, and even consumers on how they can improve the products they’re delivering.
“We are focusing on college, university, and corporate dining settings, as well as some limited retailers to really understand our customer and how the product can roll out,” Atchison explains. “But we’re really excited because we’re able to make great-tasting products featuring our strong North American supply chain and our pea protein and show the different ways that peas can be amazing in food.”
Working your way down the PURIS innovation chain, you find yourself at the company’s Dawson, Minneapolis facility, where all these pioneering pro-ducts take their nascent steps. “This plant is the largest pea protein plant in North America,” says Matt Karels, Plant Manager at PURIS. “We gauge our success on two factors – safe people and safe food. A smooth-running operation is vital to achieve that success.”
Sitting just outside of town and surrounded by thousands of acres of farmland, the former dairy plant has been retrofitted to accommodate the processes necessary to produce those four main product streams: protein, starch, fiber, and liquid. Regardless of the final product, all those perfect PURIS peas are first processed through Bühler milling equipment, a pivotal part of that smooth-running operation. “Quality and efficiency in the milling step are critical,” says Karels. “It sets the tone for the rest of the process. Bühler equipment helps us meet our production targets by remaining reliable. We turn it on, it runs. It does a phenomenal job of maintaining a particle size specification with little maintenance involved.” Karels credits the consistency of the milling process with the reliability of the downstream processes. “It impacts everything from the yield to the functionality of the final product.”
The building of the Dawson plant coincided with the building of the Bühler Food Application Center (FAC) in Plymouth, Minneapolis. This presented the perfect opportunity for the two companies to work together to optimize the milling process. “PURIS has always been an innovative company,” says Aidin Milani, Sales and Development Manager, Pulses and Spices at Bühler. “We wanted to make sure that we built enough flexibility into the system to accommodate new products in future.”
The FAC is a platform for developing new ways to transform peas, chickpeas, beans, corn, oats, special grains, and many other crops into flours, flakes, snacks, pasta, cereals, meat analogs, food ingredients, and a myriad of extruded products. And, as it turns out, this has proven to be a very useful resource for PURIS, and one they return to sometimes when they exercise their innovation muscles.
In a full-circle moment, we find ourselves back at the PURIS headquarters, but now in their pilot plant, managed by Randall Martin, Research & Development Manager at PURIS. “The purpose of the lab is really to scale up new ingredients, to develop new foods, and to create plant-based replacements for existing foods that are wildly delicious and fun.”
In the pilot plant, the PURIS team works with start-ups and big companies alike, as well as developing their own products. The heart of the lab is a Bühler 30-millimeter twin-screw extruder, the flexibility of which Randall says is key to taking those innovative product ideas from pilot scale to full production levels. “We’ve been able to develop recipes for plant-based chicken, pork, beef, and textured proteins and scale those up without having to use large amounts of ingredients.”
We are on this very long-term march towards a more sustainable food future. For us that means more plants in the center of the plate, more plants in people’s diets and more products made from plants.
Nicole Atchison, CEO of PURIS Holdings
There is a certain paradox in the pride PURIS has in the neutral flavor of their pea protein. “We’re really focused on taste,” Martin says. “We like to say that our neutral pea protein flavor is a blank, wide-open canvas. Anything from a savory steak piece that you’re trying to make all the way to a chocolate shake, you can have those flavor combinations without having to alter or change your initial flavor.” It’s staggering to think about the time, innovation, and sheer determination it has taken to make that simple statement a reality.
In the ongoing efforts to ensure a sustainable food supply, PURIS is ahead of its time. And much of their success can be attributed to the people, companies, and organizations they have worked with along the way – those like-minded groups that want to be part of the solution. “Working with suppliers that share our corporate values and our vision for the future is important and is definitely a foundation from which we continue to build,” Atchison explains. “Bühler has the same mission and then also doubles down by having the expertise and the capabilities to help us fulfill our mission. Having the same mission is important, but it’s only when we work together and accelerate faster that it really provides a meaningful benefit.”
PURIS’s future is no different than what it was when the company started out, back in rural Iowa in 1985. “We are on this very long-term march towards a more sustainable food future,” Atchison explains. “For us that means more plants in the center of the plate, more plants in people’s diets and more products made from plants. We want people to enjoy it. We don’t want it to feel like a compromise to eat more plants. And so, we are going to keep doing what we’re doing.”
Who: PURIS Holdings
When: Founded in 1985.
Where: Minneapolis, MN, United States
What: PURIS is a family-owned company whose plant-based food system benefits every link in the chain of production: flavorful and nutritious choices for people, profitable opportunities for growers, flexible ingredients for food makers, and practices that nourish soil, the environment, and life on earth.
Customers: PURIS’s customers include start-ups, major food producers, and farmers in North America.
Bühler: PURIS uses a complete Bühler milling solution for specialty crops, as well as extrusion technology in their lab.
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