Prospects of China's Corn Starch and Starch Sugar Industrial Technology

After 70 years of unremitting efforts by colleagues in the whole industry, the localization technology and equipment of China's starch and starch sugar industry have reached the overall international advanced level and some international leading levels, and are working hard to develop in the overall international leading direction. While rejoicing and proud, it is worth noting that in the foreseeable future, due to continuous fluctuations in the supply of raw materials and prices, downstream demand will stabilize, and severe surplus production capacity in the industry will appear from time to time. The starch and starch sugar industry will face continuous structural adjustment and optimization, which will put forward higher requirements for technological innovation.


In this regard, this article attempts to boldly make the following predictions in terms of raw materials, processes, products, etc.:

In terms of raw materials, one is the order agricultural planting and processing of corn. At present, most corn starch sources in China are still ordinary dent corn, which cannot effectively meet the individual needs of downstream customers for products. For this reason, we pay attention to different varieties of corn. And the impact of processing technology on the quality and downstream applications of the corn starch produced, starting from seeds and planting, supporting order-planting agriculture for different varieties of corn, product intelligent flexible production and switching processing will be the next stage of industry transformation and upgrading. One of the urgent directions is to produce corn starch and its derivative products with stable quality and meet the needs of target customers through raw material quality control and process adjustment. The second is to further increase the research and industrial utilization of non-starch polysaccharides such as cellulose. Agricultural waste represented by corn stover is rich in non-starch polysaccharides such as cellulose and hemicellulose. This resource has not yet been fully realized. Utilization and direct incineration have caused serious environmental pollution. The utilization of agricultural waste resources represented by corn stalks not only provides new raw materials for the industry, but also solves the current environmental problems caused by related waste incineration. The third is to continue to pay attention to the progress of cutting-edge disciplines such as synthetic biology and biomanufacturing. The new concept of synthesizing starch and other polysaccharides by non-plant cultivation through synthetic biology technology has been proposed, and many new artificial carbon dioxide fixation pathways have been constructed. In the future, advances in bio-manufacturing technology will overturn the industry’s current situation of using corn and other plants as raw materials.

In terms of technology, more attention should be paid to the development of new technologies, new equipment and new processes, especially the application of new enzyme preparations, microbial preparations, and new high-efficiency and energy-saving devices in starch and starch sugar technology; Under the major national strategy of “Made in China 2025”, along with the vigorous development of digital and information technologies such as the Internet of Things, blockchain, big data, and cloud computing, driven by big data, not only the intelligent production of system self-optimization has become One possibility will also promote the creation of a credible and transparent food chain system to achieve the traceability of the entire product process and full transparency to consumers.

In terms of new products, further increase the development and industrialization of starch and starch sugar products with new functionality, nutrition and further market segmentation, such as certain health effects, low calorie, sweetness characteristics, and close to sucrose Tagatose, allulose, etc., have opened up new growth points outside the red sea market for starch sugars.