Sami has just accompanied Onima with the realization of an ACV of your product, a dealcoholized beer yeast, thanks to the Diag Ecoconception device. What was your initial objective?

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We wanted to measure the impact of our product according to different industrialization hypotheses and identify first ecodesign levers.

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The second objective was to have environmental indicators that were not estimates on our part but well quantified, precise and obtained thanks to the expertise of a third party. The challenge being to be able to share these indicators with our stakeholders afterwards. It is very important to show the companies with which we collaborate but also to our investors that the work on our environmental impact is an essential subject for us and that we have good results.

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Why did you choose Sami to accompany you on this mission?

We felt very in phase with Sami's environmental values, that's a first element. Then, the reactivity of your teams and the first exchanges which went very well finished convincing us. It happened very quickly.

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What are the strong points that you retain from our support?

We were almost surprised by the quality of your support, in particular by the complete supervision of the project that you provided. From the training of the teams to the delivery of the deliverables, through the collection of data, everything was extremely well conducted. And we really appreciated the quality of the exchanges and the clarity of the consultants.

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On what have your teams been trained?

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For the ACV part, we had an internal team working on the project and this team was trained by Sami on ACV. Which allowed us to progress faster on this subject and to build skills internally.

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The interest of your approach is that the ACV was carried out upstream of large-scale production. Why this choice?

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Indeed, we are still in the industrialization phase. The interest of doing this ACV at this moment is to be able, thanks to the results of the mission, to guide our technical choices in order to minimize our environmental impact from the very beginning of the transition to industrial scale. So we wanted to model the environmental impacts of different industrialization scenarios.

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Working on your environmental impact, is it a major issue since the creation of your company?

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Onima is based on the will to offer more sustainable alternatives for our planet and our health. And since the beginning, the impact of our product, it is the major issue of our development. That's why it was so important to do this ACV upstream of the industrialization phase.

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What do you retain from the results of the ACV?

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The first important result is that the manufacturing process of the product, in particular the treatment of production waste, has a very strong impact. In parallel, the production of raw materials, which are co-products of the agri-food industry, is also an issue for us.

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And on this subject of raw materials, for equal function, we had several possibilities and we were able to identify the one that presents the best results from an environmental point of view.

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Finally, for the energy part of the industrial process, we compared several scenarios. We expected the results but we wanted to measure very precisely the difference in impact according to the energies used.

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We also worked with you on the ecodesign of your yeast. What was the challenge?

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The goal was to determine which modifications to our process are both technically feasible and will help us reduce the impact of our yeast.

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Sami organized several workshops with the teams, and we were able to identify several levers, including modifying some of our raw materials and valorizing our waste for animal feed. These are two very promising solutions to reduce our impact.

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Did the results of the LCA help enrich your reflections on eco-design?

Completely, and that's the whole point of carrying out these two missions at the same time. The LCA allows us to measure our environmental impact. The interest then is to be able to minimize it, and this is done in particular through eco-design. This is the concrete, operational part that follows from the LCA.

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How are you going to translate the results of the LCA and the work on eco-design from an operational point of view?

Now that we have identified the items with the most environmental impact, we will work on them as a priority, in particular thanks to the two eco-design levers identified, on raw materials and the valorization of our waste. We will evaluate in the laboratory the implementation of these levers in order to then evaluate and apply them on an industrial scale, these are our next steps.

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What are the other steps now in your eco-design strategy?

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We are going to set up a committee whose first function will be to update the LCA according to the expected modifications of the industrial process in the coming months. Our process is evolving a lot.

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The second role of this committee will be to ensure the follow-up of the implementation of the levers already identified but also to continue working on other tracks and to evaluate their feasibility and implementation.

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This is work that we will carry out continuously and above all in the background of the work on our process in order to always think about the environmental optimization of our product.

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Have you set quantified objectives?

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We know the environmental footprint of our process as it is today. And we also know the footprint of an optimized process by applying all the eco-design levers. So the goal is to get as close as possible to this footprint. But the technical feasibility of some tracks is still to be evaluated.