Louis Dreyfus Bets on a Pea Starch That Thickens Without Heat

DAIRY & ALTERNATIVES CONFECTIONARYBEVERAGES

Harleen Singh

6/30/20265 min read

This is an AI generated illustration and does not represent actual product or service.

The starch market has a dirty secret that most ingredient buyers already know: the cleaner the label, the harder the formulation. Replacing a chemically modified corn starch in a cold-fill yogurt alternative or a ready-to-drink nutritional shake is not simply a matter of swapping inputs. Most native and pregelatinized starches behave poorly at refrigeration temperatures — they either demand heat to activate or deliver inconsistent texture that formulators spend months trying to tame.

That tension sits at the heart of a new patent application from Louis Dreyfus Company Plant Proteins LLC, filed in October 2025 and published under international application number WO 2026/090012. The filing describes a pregelatinized pea starch (PPS) with a functional profile that looks, on paper at least, materially different from what is currently available commercially. The central claim is viscosity at cold temperatures — no heating required.

What Louis Dreyfus Is Actually Claiming

Pregelatinization is not new. The process — heating and drying native starch so it can hydrate and thicken without further cooking — has been standard practice for decades, applied to corn, potato, tapioca, and more recently pea. What changes between suppliers is largely a matter of process control: the equipment used, the temperature applied, the moisture at which the material is discharged.

What Louis Dreyfus is trying to protect here is a specific combination of functional properties they argue their process produces and competitors' products do not. The key parameters claimed are: a water absorption index (WAI) above 9 g/g, in some embodiments reaching 10 to 11 g/g; a water solubility index (WSI) above 20%, with a target range of 20 to 27%; a pH of 7 to 9.5 when dispersed at 10% solids in water; and viscosity exceeding 5,000 centipoise at 15°C without any heating step.

That last figure is worth pausing on. 5,000 cP at 15°C is a meaningful threshold. It is roughly the viscosity of a thick yogurt or heavy cream — achieved cold, without any thermal treatment of the product in which the starch is used. By contrast, the two commercial pregelatinized pea starches tested in the patent's own comparative examples achieved cold-peak viscosities of only 1,750 and 1,199 cP respectively under the same conditions. The Louis Dreyfus preparations — drum-dried at 120 and 140 psig — came in at 5,827 and 6,197 cP. That is a three- to fivefold difference.

The composition profile also sets this material apart from typical pregelatinized pea starches. On a dry basis, the claimed PPS contains 55 to 85% starch, 1 to 3% protein, and 10 to 35% fiber. The commercial comparators tested in the application reported fiber contents below 8% and protein levels below 1%. The Louis Dreyfus material retains more of the whole-pulse matrix — a deliberate choice that appears to be functionally consequential, not just a nutritional footnote.

The Process Behind the Numbers

The invention relies on a two-stage upstream approach. First, peas are milled to flour, then hydrated in water at an alkaline pH (around 9.5) and elevated temperature (55°C), and centrifuged to separate a protein-rich supernatant from the starch-fiber fraction. This step is described in a related U.S. patent application (18/792,403) covering what the company calls "specialty pea flour" (SPF). The SPF — dewatered but not yet dried — becomes the feedstock for the pregelatinization step.

That second step uses a double drum dryer. In the experiments described, a slurry at approximately 15.67% total solids is fed to an ANDRITZ Model T 5/5 double drum dryer, with steam pressure tested at 120 psig (350°F) and 140 psig (361°F). The final product exits at 6 to 10% moisture.

The alkaline processing pH is notable. It appears to be integral to the functional outcome — the elevated pH of the final product (around 8.8 to 8.9 in the disclosed examples) distinguishes it from commercially available pregelatinized pea starches, which tested at pH 5.85 and 6.21 in the same comparative analysis. Whether this alkaline signature creates any off-note or flavor challenge in finished applications is not addressed in the patent — and it is the kind of practical gap that formulators will want to evaluate independently before committing to scale.

Why This Matters Commercially

The food applications the patent identifies — milkshakes, mayonnaise, salad dressings, dairy alternatives including yogurt, ice cream, creamers, buttermilk, and cheese — are all categories where cold viscosity is a genuine technical requirement, not a nice-to-have.

Dairy-free yogurt is a useful case study. Most plant-based yogurts on the market today rely on a combination of hydrocolloids — typically gellan gum, pectin, modified starch, and sometimes locust bean gum — to achieve a texture that tolerates the cold chain from manufacture through to the consumer's refrigerator. Each of those components adds label complexity, cost, and potential sourcing risk. A single clean-label starch that delivers strong cold viscosity without requiring a hot-process step could simplify formulations substantially. It could also support cold-fill manufacturing lines where adding a heat-activation step would require capital expenditure or compromise throughput.

Nutritional supplements and ready-to-drink formats face similar constraints. Adding starch functionality without a cooking step is attractive in ambient-fill applications where particle stability and shear behavior at low temperatures determine shelf-life performance.

The higher fiber content — 13 to 15% in the disclosed examples — is a secondary commercial opportunity. Fiber fortification is a stated goal of many product development briefs in the dairy alternative and functional food space. A starch ingredient that contributes both textural function and a meaningful fiber contribution simplifies the formulation map.

Strategic Context: Louis Dreyfus in the Plant Protein Race

Louis Dreyfus Company is not typically associated with ingredient innovation in the way that purpose-built food-tech startups are. It is a commodity trading and processing giant with global operations across grains, oilseeds, and pulses. Its plant proteins subsidiary in Livermore, California, represents a deliberate strategic move into the higher-margin, IP-protected ingredient space — a pattern several large agribusinesses have followed as margins in bulk commodity trading compress.

The timing of this patent, filed in October 2024 and published April 2026, sits squarely within a period of heightened commercial interest in pulse-derived ingredients. Pea starch specifically has attracted attention as a cleaner alternative to modified corn and potato starches in products targeting the clean-label consumer. Several European and North American suppliers have built pea starch capacity over the past five years. The challenge has been differentiating on function rather than competing on price, where commodity processors have a structural advantage.

By patenting a specific combination of process conditions and functional properties rather than just the pea starch concept itself, Louis Dreyfus is attempting to stake out defensible IP in a crowded field. The approach mirrors how ingredient companies in the protein space have sought protection — not for the raw material, but for the specific processing route and the performance profile it yields.

What to Watch

For ingredient developers and procurement strategists, the strategic signal here is clearer than the technical one. A company of Louis Dreyfus's scale entering the functional pea starch space with a differentiated IP position and dedicated R&D in California suggests this is not a marginal product line. If the cold-viscosity performance holds up under independent formulation testing and in food-matrix conditions beyond the laboratory examples in the patent, this ingredient could put genuine pressure on existing pregelatinized pea starch suppliers to raise their performance bar.

The broader implication is structural. If it becomes possible to formulate a stable, thick, clean-label plant-based dairy product with a single pea starch ingredient instead of a four- or five-component hydrocolloid system, that changes both the economics and the supply chain logic of the category. That outcome is not guaranteed by this patent — but it is the direction Louis Dreyfus is pointing.