Company: Lyras
Founder: Rasmus Mortensen
Website: https://lyras.com/
About Lyras
Founded in 2017, Lyras is a Danish industrial machine manufacturing company based in Aalborg, Denmark. The company was established based on the desire to prove that sustainable pasteurisation is possible. Pasteurising milk with UV light had never been done before, simply because the non-see-through liquid is impossible to shine a light through and for this reason, milk became the main focus area of our research.
In 1864, the French chemist Louis Pasteur developed a method for preserving liquid foods by heating them up and cooling them down in rapid succession – i.e. pasteurisation. For the past 150 years, pasteurisation has saved millions of lives by inactivating the bacteria within easily corruptible foods, such as dairy products, thereby preserving them for longer periods.
Though at the time revolutionary, heat pasteurisation is not without drawbacks. It is a time-consuming process that lowers the product quality while consuming vast amounts of energy in the heating and cooling processes. Today, almost all liquid food products are pasteurised including milk, juice, soda and plant-based drinks. Pasteurised products are thereby an inevitable part of the consumer’s everyday life, though only a minority of consumers are aware of this.
Lyras develops, produces, and delivers a non-thermal, UV-based pasteurisation replacement for the liquid processing industry, called ‘raslysation’. The natural anti-bacterial properties of UV light have been known for more than 100 years. It is widely used for disinfecting drinking and processing water, but now it can also be used for opaque liquids such as milk. This allows for a more sustainable production process.
The development of Raslysation technology is built on evidence-based research and extensive consultation with a range of stakeholders – e.g. the dairy and juice industry, academia, public health experts and specialists. Lyras’ technology uses low-pressure germicidal UV lamps to generate the disinfecting light and integrated light filters which remove the unnecessary wavelengths that otherwise could risk lower product quality. The light filter only allows for the desired wavelengths to pass through, and these inactivate spores and bacteria at a level conventional pasteurisation cannot.
Our unique design geometry creates a turbulent flow that exposes the entire volume of the liquid. In short, you have a system that can treat any liquid products – independent of transparency and product type.
By switching from conventional thermal pasteurisation to the less resource-intensive raslysation technology, customers can reduce their energy and water consumption by 60-90% and 60-80% respectively.
By 2030, Lyras aims to have saved the food industry 1.000.000 metric tons of CO2, equivalent to 180,000 Europeans’ annual use. Lyras has representatives in Spain, Italy, the UK, the Netherlands, Turkey, New Zealand, and Australia, and has sales and services worldwide.
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