Inleit is the promoter of the first infrastructure dedicated to the production of milk protein in Galicia and the first plant for the synthesis of high quality proteins and dairy by-products, a project based on the union between scientific research and food production.

It is one of the Advanced Manufacturing Centres promoted by the Galician Regional Government through a call for grants aimed at the creation of infrastructures, shared factories and R&D centres available to different industrial sectors.

The basis of the project lies in extracting products from milk with high added value for the food, nutritional and sports industries. Committed to research, development and innovation, functional ingredients are sourced using cutting-edge technologies to deliver what is known as new nutrition.

The objective of this Advanced Manufacturing Centre is to lead the dairy ingredients distribution sector in Galicia and to be the knowledge centre for the food and nutrition industry through R&D and in continuous collaboration with other companies in the sector, universities and scientific institutions.

The new plant was designed to meet the highest levels of food safety and quality. A project started with the vocation of international leadership in which participants can find a strategic partner for the new era of nutrition.

Among its objectives is to contribute to the development of the local industrial base and to improve the competitiveness of small and medium-sized enterprises. The plant also aims to solve limitations found in the technologies used so far - which damage the native structures of the proteins during the separation processes - in order to obtain higher levels of purity of these substances.

The Advanced Manufacturing Centre has state-of-the-art equipment for milk fractionation, retentate and permeate modification and protein functionalisation. The project has involved an investment of close to five million euros, of which 2.4 million have been provided by the Galician Regional Government through the Igape.

Unique pilot plant in Spain

The centre is located in a building constructed on the site of the Inleit factory in the Curtis Teixeiro industrial park. It is owned by the company, whose aim is to convert it into a unique pilot plant in Spain for the development of R&D&I projects related to milk proteins and which can be opened to other companies.

This opens the door for initiatives that usually had to be subcontracted to foreign companies to be carried out in Galicia, with all the positive effects that this means for the sector as a whole.

With this new infrastructure, Inleit will seek to differentiate itself from other companies specialising in what are known as standard proteins, enabling the production of enriched products and competing with large multinationals in the sector.

Currently, there Is no similar infrastructure at the national level, and only 3 of the 8 main competitors in the sector (at the international level) have access to the technologies present in this advanced plant.

The focus of this plant will be the development of new types of protein. Thus, the work will focus on obtaining different proteins and ingredients from milk. These will be modified by various techniques in order to obtain new types of proteins whose nutritional index and functionalities are different from those obtained to date. This opens up a host of new applications, both from a product perspective and from a nutritional and food point of view. 

The Advanced Manufacturing Centre shares space with Inleit Ingredients, a Galician subsidiary of Liasa (Grupo Lácteos Industriales Agrupados), which began operations in 2020. Since its creation, the company has focused its activity on the production and transformation of milk into other products, such as fractionated dairy products, liquid concentrates and powdered ingredients.

All the milk processed at the plant, which employs 174 people, comes from Galician farms. Specifically, 226 individual farms, to which around 120 more are added indirectly through purchases from the three cooperatives Leitenoso, Clun and Aira. In 2021, more than 262 million litres of milk were processed.