Profile

Royal Cosun is an agri-industrial group firmly rooted in the primary sector. The businesses that belong to Cosun are Aviko, Duynie, Sensus, Suiker Unie, SVZ and Cosun Biobased Products. They produce food ingredients and products that make their way to the food industry, foodservice sector and retail channels. In addition, the group is increasingly focusing on components for non-food applications.
 
Cosun's ambition is to get the most out of its raw materials: this is good for the environment, profitability and meets society's demand for responsible products and production methods. The Cosun businesses also supply products to the animal feed sector and residual products are used to produce biogas.
 
Royal Cosun was established nearly 120 years ago by Dutch sugar beet growers who united themselves in a cooperative. Today, the cooperative has some 8,800 member/shareholders and has grown into a business with 3,900 employees [in FTE] and a group turnover of about €2 billion annually.

 

Consun  extract energy from plants

 
Plants turn sunlight into energy and store it in the form of foodstuffs such as sugars. We extract those valuable components from the vegetable raw materials in our factories. And that is not all; there are many more valuable substances in plants.


 


Suiker Unie:
  • processes sugar beet into granulated sugar for human consumption
  • sells the fibres that remain (pulp) as animal feed
  • uses the molasses to make yeast or alcohol
  • returns the soil attaching to the beet to the farms or uses it to raise land levels
  • re-uses precipitated salts and minerals as soil improvers
  • uses the purified water in its own production processes or to water plants in greenhouses
  • ferments the organic residues into biogas.
And lots more …
The process for fruit and vegetables, chicory and potatoes is comparable but the components are different. Cosun is investigating whether other valuable components can be extracted from the raw materials. We are studying ways to recover phosphate, for example, so that it can be reused. This means less fertiliser in the environment, less waste and cleaner water.