Bioraffinery concept applied to aromatic plants: Case of saffron

AGFD 102

TJ. Talou, talou@cict.fr, M. Bergoin-Lefort, and C. Raynaud. agro-industrial chemistry laboratory, National Polytechnic Institute of Toulouse, ENSIACET, 118 route de narbonne, Toulouse, 31077, France
A multivalorization approach called bioraffinery Concept (BIORAF) was applied to various aromatic plants in order to sequentially valorize their high value compounds. Basically, constituting compounds were first extracted by using mainly physical processing methods and then free secondary metabolites were valorized by using hydrodistillation or novel green solvent extraction. Finally, the extraction by-products could be processed either for the design of agromaterials nor for ultimate aromatic valorization step by using enzyme cocktails in order to hydrolyse glycosidic bounded aroma molecules. In order to produce 1kg of saffron (the famous spice) , more than 160,000 flowers were processed, representing 360kg of floral and 1,500kg of leaves wastes. The processing according to BIORAF of stamen, petals, leaves, stems and corms of harvested Crocus sativus allowed to obtain both oleoresin, concrete, absolute and essential oil presently tested in aromatic industry, and a high concentrated yellow/orange dying extract with promising applications in textile industry.