Nam Fong Han and Steve Cui have cracked the nut of the flax problem.
Han, president of health food and cosmetic ingredient manufacturer Natunola, opened what is believed to be the world’s first commercial scale flax hulling facility in Winchester, Ont., near Ottawa last November.
Cui designed the process that Han is using.
It’s been known for years that flax’s hull and interior nut contain oil, soluble and insoluble fibre, lignin and omega-three fatty acids, but separating them efficiently was always a problem.
Read Also
‘Sinc’ remembered for dedication to rural Saskatchewan
A rural Saskatchewan leader instantly recognized by just his first name is being remembered for his dedication to the province.
The United States Department of Agriculture identified the potential of flax as a value-added crop for the Plains more than 45 years ago. Researchers and food manufacturers in Minnesota worked on the issue in the 1950s trying to find a solution, but failed to discover a way to cleanly extract the core nut, or kernel, from the outer hull.
The tiny, slippery-skinned seeds could only be mechanically crushed and then ground, heated or both. This left too much oil in the fibre and too much fibre in the oil. Heat-treating the whole seed was expensive and destroyed some of the desirable contents.
Flax oil and ground meal easily oxidizes and becomes rancid, but left in the kernel, without the hulls, its shell life extends to more than nine months.
Steve Cui, an Agriculture Canada researcher in Guelph, Ont., knew of these problems and set out to find solutions.
Crushing seed created “a product that is very hard to work with, hard to extract all of the products,” he said.
“Lignin and the soluble and insoluble dietary fibre were tough to get at without a new method of extraction.”
Cui began his research in Morden, Man., and moved to Guelph along with his work several years ago when program changes relocated flax processing research to Ontario.
He created a patented method of drying and abrasion in 1996 that has been refined into the system that Han is now using and for which he has the development licence.
“These (old) crushing processes left a lot of the lignin in the hull and this would ultimately be lost as animal feed,” Cui said.
“Our new process improved lignin recovery by four times. The hull of the flax seed is one quarter of the weight of the seed and contains fibre and other products.”
Lignin yield is normally 0.5 to one percent of seed volume. By hulling rather than grinding, processors are able to recover four times as much of this product.
Lignin is marketed for its cancer-fighting and other health properties.
Flax fibre is smooth and can be used in a variety of cosmetics. Last week, Natunola brought to market two new cosmetic ingredients made from flax fibre at the Winchester plant.
The flax kernel is toasted and used as a bakery ingredient, and Han said he recently signed a Canadian distribution contract for the product.
“It’s like a toasted sesame seed or tiny nut and it has a wonderful nutty flavour with all of the health benefits of flax,” Han said.
He said his company needs to buy flax from Western Canada because Ontario has limited production.
“If this works well, I hope we will be building more plants and closer to the source in Western Canada,” Han said.
“We see a true value-added product here and Canada is the biggest exporter of flax in the world, so this could be something really important for growers.”
For the past two years, Natunola has sold gels based on western canola, sunflower, castor and rice bran oil to the cosmetic and health-care industries.
The process’s remaining byproducts, oil and some fibre, are still marketed as livestock feed.
Han has bought the international development rights for the process and said interest in flax as food is growing rapidly in urban U.S. markets and Europe.
