Chennai: Cola and snack food major PepsiCo India Holdings Private Limited has decided to expand its experimental seaweed project in Mandapam, Tamil Nadu to a commercial scale.

The company has decided to build a Carrageenan plant either in Mandapam or in Tuticorin in Tamil Nadu, sometime next year.

While Carrageenan, a biopolymer extracted from red seaweed is used as a thickening agent in the food processing and pharmaceutical industries that will be exported, the byproduct sap, a plant nutrient will be sold in the domestic market.

Says Abhiram Seth, executive director, exports and external affairs, ''We are yet to finalise the plant capacity and the outlay. The numbers are dependent on the volume of seaweed available.''

According to him, investment in the plant will also depend on the level of sophistication required, like whether the seaweed is to be sun dried or machine dried.

''A plant that could process 5,000 ton per annum of dry weed will be the minimum economic size. It would involve a capex of around Rs10 crore,'' he added.

In 1999, PepsiCo and the Central Salt and Marine Chemicals Research Institute decided to explore the possibility of growing red seaweed in Mandapam.

Sourcing the technology from the institute, PepsiCo would provide the technical know-how to growers and would buy the wet weed for Rs12 per kilogram.

According to Seth, women self help groups numbering around 60 grow the seaweed in Mandapam.

After sourcing the wet weed, PepsiCo ships out the dried weed to its sister facility in South East Asia for making Carrageenan.

According to Seth, PepsiCo hopes to involve at least 20,000 people in seaweed cultivation in order to get sizeable volume. An individual can typically grow 20 kilogram of weed, every 45 days.

''One kilogram of dry weed can give 250 gram of Carrageenan,'' he adds.

Speaking of the plant nutrient he says, trials of sap fertiliser were carried out on sugarcane crops in Karnataka and paddy in Punjab. ''The crop germination and the cane yield improved by over 30 per cent. The sweetness in the cane juice was higher by 2-3 per cent,'' he remarks.