Stories (Reflections) 

Our stories are organised across two areas: Sweet Sorghum Syrup + Leaf Protein.

Voyage Log | LOG‑2026‑01 | Leg: Reconnaissance

• Published: June 2026

• Related Event: Sweet Sorghum Syrup Demonstration Line (2026)

• Last updated: June 2026 · 5‑minute read 

• Status: Ongoing exploration 

• Summary ：After nearly a decade, we confirmed what we long suspected: the modern value chain for sweet sorghum syrup has never existed. We are no longer piecing together fragments — we are building a verifiable, scalable supply chain from scratch. 

From Fragments to Coordinates – Lessons from Our Detour

The Long Road to 2019

It was not until 2019 that we finally recognised a sobering fact: the sweet sorghum syrup supply chain does not exist in the modern industrial landscape. And it took us nearly a decade to arrive at that recognition.

May 2011 — The Splicing Illusion

In May 2011, we visited the Louisiana Green Fuels LLC biorefinery in the United States. Over a dozen large diffusers stood in a row — an impressive sight, full of modern industrial promise. The plant manager told us that the local government had invested an additional two million dollars to build a dedicated railway line, stretching dozens of kilometres, from the sugarcane fields directly to the plant gate. Not long after, the plant shut down.

November 2015 — Material Deviations

In 2015, we collaborated with the University of Florida on a simulated industrial-scale trial for sweet sorghum syrup, and we obtained sample syrup. The trials revealed significant differences between sweet sorghum and sugarcane — in harvest windows, material properties, and processing behaviour. Still, we believed that the completeness of modern industrial systems could accommodate a full production line.

The Biofuel Era — and Its Blind Spot

Since 2000, climate change had propelled the world into a golden age of discovery for biofuels, and countless reports painted a bright future for sweet sorghum-to-ethanol. We optimistically combed through volumes of literature and shuttled between manufacturers and engineers across different fields — from Florida to Shanghai.

But the evidence was clear: in publicly available literature, almost nothing existed on industrial processes, equipment systems, or harvesting methods for sweet sorghum syrup. For years, we had been circling within a fragmented blind spot, convinced that the answers were merely hiding in some corner we had not yet searched.

August 2018 — The Regulatory Shift

In August 2018, the EU formally approved sweet sorghum syrup for the food market, opening a new direction for us. For the first time, sweet sorghum syrup gained an official food‑grade identity — shifting its potential from “energy crop” to “food ingredient.”

Through literature reviews, field research, and step‑by‑step progress across the supply chain, we finally pieced together, from scattered fragments of information, a sobering realisation by 2019: the sweet sorghum syrup industrial chain had never actually existed in the modern industrial landscape.

In a blind spot, you don‘t know what you don’t know.

The challenge with sweet sorghum syrup is not a shortage of a few key machines. It is the absence of a verifiable, scalable, replicable modern industrial chain. Publicly available information on industrial processes, equipment, and harvesting systems is extremely limited; many critical links must be redefined from the ground up.

That realisation brought us to a halt — no more patching and tweaking within the old framework. We decided to build a new industrial chain from zero — from harvesting systems to syrup samples, everything starts anew. At every step of this chain, we are on site.

The Historical Context

In 1890, U.S. production of sweet sorghum syrup reached 22 million gallons — roughly 120,000 tons. But it lost its competitive edge due to crystallisation difficulties. The industry faded, and with it, the industrial and research communities gradually withdrew, leaving behind no inheritable industrial base.

Now

We see clearly: food‑grade syrup and bio‑based products share the same underlying supply chain. Food‑grade syrup may well be our beachhead for re‑entering this new territory.

Today, the key equipment architecture is largely in place, and a demonstration system integrating AI and Industry 4.0 concepts is taking shape. We need dialogue partners — and even more, we need fellow travellers. 

Join us in finding out: mirage, or new world?

Voyage Log | LOG 2026-06-02 | Leg: Reconnaissance

• Published: June 2026

• Related Event: Danish Grass Protein Demonstration Project Shutdown (2025)

• Reading time: approx. 4 minutes

• Keywords: Leaf protein / Screw pressing / Δt / Time‑mechanics map / Biomass mechanics

• Status: Ongoing exploration 

• Last updated: June 2026 

Summary: the shutdown of a Danish demonstration project prompted us to revisit the fundamental logic of leaf‑protein industrialisation. Why have decades of effort failed to produce a replicable industrial pathway? Following this thread, we found that the screw‑pressing system has always lacked a time dimension (Δt) — leaving the process invisible and preventing any engineering description of the release mechanisms. We are now building an observable, quantifiable test platform, aiming to produce the first time‑mechanics map of leaf‑protein release.

Finding Δt: Rethinking Leaf Protein

At first, we were merely observers, watching a green industry that Europe had pinned high hopes on.

In 2021, during COVID-19, a Hong Kong business contact asked us to reach out to Aarhus University to learn about clover protein projects. That was our first encounter with the field of leaf protein.

In October 2022, a team from South Dakota State University visited Aarhus University and BioRefine Denmark A/S through our arrangement, exchanging views on clover protein. Back then, we were still on the shore.

In 2023, BioRefine Denmark A/S came under financial pressure. We proactively proposed a collaboration — to run some clover protein extraction trials using our own test equipment, aiming to explore the underlying causes. Our reasoning was simple: whether extracting sugar or protein, both are fundamentally "biomass mechanical behaviours" — the deformation, fracture, and release of materials under mechanical stress. This is a cross-sector engineering problem. But we received no further response.

In early 2025, BioRefine Denmark A/S announced the shutdown of its production line. We began to re‑examine the history and current state of leaf‑protein extraction — it was time to rethink leaf protein.

The literature shows that for over half a century, leaf‑protein extraction in Europe has revolved almost exclusively around the screw‑pressing system first proposed by Dr. N.W. Pirie (UK, 1950s). This system enabled early engineering exploration, but the overall pathway has seen limited evolution since. Whether with alfalfa or clover, both research and industrial trials have followed the same route. In the 1970s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture experimented with a sugarcane roller mill (PRO XAN I, 1974) for alfalfa protein extraction, but that direction was not pursued further.

The screw‑pressing system is not "the source of the problem" — it is "the starting point of the pathway."

But we are not traditional researchers in the leaf‑protein field. Our background lies in sweet sorghum juice extraction, plant tissue disruption, and biomass release behaviour. Precisely because we come from outside the field, we found ourselves asking a simple question that had long been overlooked: how exactly is protein released from leaves?

Multiple studies have further revealed the actual performance:

• Path dependency — leaf‑protein extraction has long relied on the screw‑pressing system, with little change in experimental pathways (AAU, 2020);

• Performance ceiling — single‑pass pressing typically recovers only about 16% of protein; multi‑pass pressing can improve recovery but reduces protein quality (DTU, 2022);

• Non‑transferability — different crops behave very differently under the same process, indicating that the current system cannot provide describable, comparable engineering principles (SLU, 2021).

These findings point to a single judgment: the screw‑pressing system lacks an observable microscopic time window — Δt.

Without Δt, the release process cannot be observed, kinetic descriptions cannot be established, and scale‑up cannot escape the cycle of trial and error.

We need to go back to the fundamentals — to clarify the relationship between time, mechanical pathways, and protein release. That means replacing the experimental pathway with a test platform that incorporates Δt, and attempting to produce the first time‑mechanics map of leaf‑protein release.

Introducing Δt does not guarantee that we will observe the release mechanism. But we know we must try — because the old pathway is already locked.

Since August 2025, we have been in ongoing discussions with Aarhus University to co‑develop a "cross‑crop leaf‑protein test platform" — exploring the full range of possibilities.

Our goal is precisely this map.

Would you like to explore this territory with us?