SCO2, Inc
- Type
- Technology Company
- Industries
- Food ingredients & products, New food processing techniques, Waste efficiency, Clean label, Food reformulation
- Domains
- Feed, Ingredients, Wheat, Plant based primary products
- Technologies
- Extraction, Process automation, Processing, Robotics & Automation, Resource-recovery technology, Circular & resource technologies
About SCO2, Inc
SCO2, Inc. develops and commercializes Nextract Technology, an industrial supercritical CO₂ extraction system designed to recover high-value ingredients from biomass streams that would otherwise be disposed of, composted, burned, or sold as low-value feed. The company positions itself as a circular-economy solution for food and biomass processors, aiming to turn byproducts into saleable ingredient fractions without interrupting existing operations.
Based in Little Canada, Minnesota, SCO2 says its approach is built for on-site deployment inside a customer’s facility. Its messaging emphasizes scalable, automated extraction with clean-label output, targeting operators that want to reduce waste while creating new revenue from streams such as tomato pomace, spent coffee grounds, and wheat bran.
Core Values
- Waste reduction and circularity: SCO2 frames its mission around preventing waste and recovering value from streams that are currently discarded or underused.
- Efficiency and scalability: The company highlights automation, short cycle times, and industrial throughput as core design principles, contrasting its system with slower legacy extraction methods.
- Clean-label processing: SCO2 stresses solvent-free extraction, no hexane, and no additional downstream chemistry, supporting cleaner ingredient profiles.
- Innovation through engineering: The company presents its breakthrough as an engineering redesign of an established technology, focused on making supercritical CO₂ extraction commercially scalable.
Unique Aspects
- Patented five-stage extraction process: SCO2 says Nextract uses five controlled pressure stages to separate molecules by mass and capture fractions cleanly.
- Designed for existing facilities: The system is intended to be licensed, co-located, and fed by a customer’s current biomass stream, allowing deployment without stopping the line.
- Industrial-scale throughput: SCO2 claims throughput of 1–25 tons per hour per deployed system, positioning the platform for large-volume biomass processors.
- Multiple high-value fractions from one stream: The company highlights the ability to produce several saleable outputs from the same byproduct, including fiber, oil, protein, and bioactive fractions.
- Experienced founding team: SCO2 presents its leadership as industrial engineers and food-industry professionals with backgrounds in waste processing, patents, scaling businesses, and open innovation at Danone.