Mingyang Biochemical Leads the High-End Transformation of the Biomass Materials Industry: Over 200 Possibilities of a Single Grain of Starch

Step into the Mingyang Branch of the National Key Laboratory for Non-Grain Biomass Energy Technologies, led and jointly built by Guangxi Nongken Myngyang Biochemical Co., Ltd., and it feels as if you’re walking into a modern “molecular factory.” Tapioca starch, once an ordinary food ingredient, is transformed here into high-precision “designed materials” through integrated modification technologies such as physical activation, chemical modification, and biological enzymatic hydrolysis—achieving a spectacular transformation from field crops to high-tech products.

In the laboratory, bottle after bottle filled with white powder look almost identical, but what’s inside holds countless secrets. “One grain of tapioca starch can give rise to more than 200 new materials.” The laboratory deputy director, Wang Jinyu, said this, completely overturning people’s traditional understanding of starch.

These seemingly ordinary powders turn into special paper functional enhancers, helping the industry achieve domestic substitution; they become the ink base for edible 3D food printing, providing a green and eco-friendly solution for the development of personalized foods; and they turn into the core raw materials for biodegradable materials, contributing industrial strength toward the country’s “dual carbon” goals. Today, tapioca starch has long stepped out of the traditional food categories such as buns and steamed bread, and has expanded widely into multiple areas including biodegradable materials, electrostatic adsorption materials, glass fiber additives, cosmetics, special paper, edible 3D-printed foods, and more—growing into highly promising future green high-tech products.

“Biodegradable materials are our high–value-added new products we develop, and they can be widely used in the production of medical waste bags, agricultural mulch films, eco-friendly shopping bags, and other fields.” Wang Jinyu picked up a sample bottle and introduced it. Traditional plastic that naturally biodegrades takes more than 200 years, while this starch-based biodegradable material can be fully degraded in just 6 months in suitable environments—solving the problem of “white pollution” at its root.

The hard-core strength of technological innovation has borne abundant results at Myngyang Biochemical. Currently, relying on the key laboratory, the company has successfully developed 39 industry-leading achievements, and has led or participated in the release of 34 national and industry standards. The company’s general manager, Zhong Mingxue, said that by leveraging the laboratory’s research advantages, the company has built an industrial ecosystem with deep integration across multiple business formats, such as food deep processing, professional feed intelligent manufacturing, and innovative manufacturing of biodegradable materials—taking a characteristic, high-end path for industrial development.

As a leading enterprise in China’s tapioca-modified starch sector, Myngyang Biochemical has always placed R&D and innovation at the core position. In 2025, the company’s R&D investment accounted for 4.89% of its annual operating revenue. The company has broken through the bottleneck of traditional single modification technology, building a three-in-one core modification technology system integrating physical activation, chemical modification, and biological enzymatic hydrolysis. This enables directional design of starch molecular structures and precise functional enhancement, completely rewriting the application landscape of tapioca starch.

At the same time, relying on frontier green technologies such as fermentation acidification, controllable degradation, precise enzymatic processing, and efficient grafting, Myngyang Biochemical’s new generation of modified starch has achieved all-round leaps in product safety, scenario adaptability, use stability, and degradability. Impressive market data confirms the value of technological innovation: In 2025, the sales volume of the company’s native starch products exceeded 10 thousand tons, up 95% year over year; and the sales volume of modified tapioca starch exceeded 18 thousand tons, with its market competitiveness continuing to rise.

During the “14th Five-Year Plan” period, Myngyang Biochemical has seen a steady stream of good news from scientific and technological innovation. Multiple technologies, including “Key Technology Innovation and Integrated Application for Quality and Safety Improvement of Edible Tapioca,” “Green Key Processing Technology and Application of Edible Tapioca Starch and Whole-Powder Products,” and others, have successfully injected strong momentum into the industry’s development.

Technology helps tapioca achieve a leap in value, and connecting the transformation of research achievements into real-world applications—the “last mile”—is the key to high-quality industrial development. In response, Myngyang Biochemical’s answer is: orient toward market demand and make every effort to fully connect the entire industrial chain of “R&D—pilot testing—mass production—market.”

Currently, the company has laid out three major production bases, forming a development pattern in which “R&D + high-end manufacturing” and large-scale production advance in coordination. Meanwhile, it innovatively adopts a “technology output + cooperative processing” model: deploying mature process technologies into overseas partner production bases, so that China’s advanced starch technologies go beyond its borders, amplifying industrialization outcomes and enhancing international influence. In 2025, closely aligned with actual market demands in industries such as food, papermaking, and feed, the company successfully developed 31 new products. Among them, 6 high–value-added functional products have passed customer testing smoothly; for the whole year, the new products’ production reached 1.75 thousand tons and sales were 1.56 thousand tons—truly turning the research achievements in the laboratory into tangible market competitiveness.

While achieving its own high-quality development, Myngyang Biochemical also proactively assumes industry responsibility and actively promotes the revision work for the national standard 《Tapioca Starch》. The company’s chairman, Chen Mingyu, said that the current 《Tapioca Starch》 national standard has been in effect since 2012 and can no longer meet the new needs arising from rapid industrial development. This revision can both standardize the quality of imported products and enhance China’s international discourse power in the tapioca starch field, and can also provide standards suited to emerging application areas such as biodegradable materials.

Compared with international advanced peers, Myngyang Biochemical still has room to improve in areas such as ultra-precise functional customization, the share of high–value-added products, the commercialization rate of R&D achievements, and the level of intelligent and continuous production. In response, the company has clearly defined its development direction for the “15th Five-Year Plan”: focusing on functional precision, product high-end positioning, and diversified applications, and making a full push to reach international advanced levels.

Chen Mingyu said that in the future, the company will focus on developing 8 categories of modified starch products, breaking through high-end process technologies, and striving to raise the share of high–value-added products to 40% or more; at the same time, relying on the National Key Laboratory for Non-Grain Biomass Energy Technologies, it will focus on tackling new starch-based biodegradable materials, continuously extending the non-grain biomass industrial chain, and making strenuous efforts to move into the forefront of the global tapioca-modified starch sector—lighting a new future for green industrial development through technological innovation.（Economic Daily reporter Tong Zheng）