Lodi's Grape Biomass: Examining a Bioeconomy Opportunity

Lodi
Written By Don Bradford
Lodi's Grape Biomass: Examining a Bioeconomy Opportunity

Lodi's Grape Biomass: Examining a Bioeconomy Opportunity

LodiEye — June, 2026

Summary

Lodi's wineries and vineyards produce a large, steady stream of organic leftovers every year: grape pomace (the skins, seeds, and stems left after grapes are pressed), wine lees (the settled solids from fermentation), and the wood from pruned and pulled vines. Most of it is composted, spread on fields, or hauled away. A Modesto-based nonprofit, BEAM Circular, is building a North San Joaquin Valley "bioeconomy" that turns farm and food waste into higher-value products and jobs — but its certified raw-material program is built around nuts and orchard wood, not grapes.

This report examines a question, not a plan: could Lodi's grape leftovers anchor a grape-and-wine version of that idea? It lays out what the raw numbers look like, how Lodi compares to facilities already running overseas, what other California wine regions are doing, the rough economics, and which local organizations would need to weigh in. It is a starting point for a local conversation.

BEAM Circular, and Lodi to date

The regional effort has an organization behind it. BEAM Circular, a Modesto-based nonprofit founded in 2023 and led by chief executive Karen Warner, is building a "circular bioeconomy" across the three-county North San Joaquin Valley — Merced, San Joaquin, and Stanislaus. It has drawn more than $20 million in state and regional funding, including a $10.4 million California Jobs First regional award and $8 million from the 2025 state budget, and it is developing a California Bioeconomy Innovation Campus, with a Modesto site selected in 2026. Its CBIO Collaborative now counts more than 100 partners, among them Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Merced, and it runs a startup accelerator for young bio-based companies. The region has also been certified as North America's first "bioeconomy development opportunity zone" — but for orchard biomass, nut shells, and almond hulls, not grapes.

That effort already has a Lodi footprint. On May 21, 2026, BEAM held its BioCatalyst event at Wine & Roses in Lodi, bringing the regional bioeconomy conversation into the heart of wine country. The venue made the underlying point on its own: Lodi and San Joaquin County grow much of the feedstock the wider effort depends on, even though the seed funding and the planned innovation campus are concentrated in Stanislaus County.

Local engagement beyond the event is still early. According to the Lodi District Chamber of Commerce, BEAM has begun reaching out to the area's agricultural businesses to find linkages — existing operations whose waste streams a bio-based venture could use, or that could supply related products such as packaging. The Chamber's president and chief executive, JP Doucette, shared his read with LodiEye.

Doucette sees opportunity on two fronts. The first is attracting one of the young companies in BEAM's accelerator, many of which are still very small and without a permanent base; landing one in Lodi would bring the larger economic benefit. The second is supplying feedstock, which he said "should not be discounted." He pointed to Pacific Coast Producers, the Lodi-headquartered cannery, which already ships its peach pits to a company that uses them in cruise-ship biodigesters. Proximity to the feedstock, he added, is itself a draw, because it lowers a company's cost of hauling material to a processing site.

On the Chamber's own role, Doucette was direct. He said the Chamber, through its agri-business committee, should work with the Lodi Economic Development Department to match established local ag companies with the new bio-circular ventures — as customers or suppliers, as technical advisors, or as tenants sharing facilities that are under-used today.

Why grapes, and why now

If BEAM is the opening, the 2025 burn ban is the pressure. A state rule phased out most agricultural open burning starting in January 2025, just as low grape prices pushed growers to pull thousands of acres of vines. Removing vines and disposing of the wood can cost a grower roughly $2,000 to $3,000 an acre. That woody material, plus the pomace that every crush produces, is piling up with nowhere efficient to go.

The gap is what makes grapes specifically interesting. BEAM's certified-feedstock program is built around nuts and orchard wood; grapes are not part of it. Yet Lodi is among the largest winegrape regions in the country, crushing on the order of half a million tons a year. The most obvious thing Lodi could add to the regional bioeconomy is precisely the material the program does not yet cover.

The raw material: what Lodi's vineyards and wineries leave behind

Three leftover streams recur every year. The largest by far is grape pomace. Lodi-area wineries generate an estimated 110,000 to 130,000 tons of it annually — roughly 20 to 25 percent of the weight of grapes crushed. Wine lees add a few thousand more tons. Separately, the field generates pruned canes each winter, on the order of 50,000 to 130,000 dry tons across the area's bearing acreage.

Estimated recurring grape biomass in the Lodi area, by stream

Source: LodiEye estimates derived from the 2025 District 11 grape crush and Lodi-area bearing acreage. Figures are midpoints of wide ranges; see text.

These figures are estimates with real uncertainty, and three caveats matter. Pomace is created where grapes are crushed, not where they are grown, and not all Lodi fruit is crushed locally — so the volume a facility could actually collect within a sensible distance is smaller than the district total. Bearing acreage is falling as vines come out, so the pruning stream will shrink before it settles. And every number moves with moisture: fresh pomace is more than half water.

Among the three, pomace is the most interesting. It is concentrated at a relatively small number of wineries rather than spread across thousands of acres, it arrives on a predictable schedule each fall, and it contains genuinely valuable chemistry — tartaric acid (a compound wineries and food makers buy back), grapeseed oil, and polyphenols (plant compounds used in supplements and cosmetics). Today most of that value is left in the compost pile.

Is there enough to matter? Lodi next to working facilities

A fair first question is whether Lodi's volume is large enough to support a real processing operation, or whether this is only a backyard-scale idea. The most useful answer comes from facilities that already exist. Two of the best-known grape-byproduct operations in the world run at almost exactly Lodi's estimated pomace volume.

Lodi's estimated annual pomace next to two operating facilities

Source: LodiEye pomace estimate; Tarac Technologies and Caviro company figures for grape marc and pomace-plus-lees processed.

Tarac Technologies in Australia has processed grape leftovers since 1929; today it handles about 120,000 tonnes of marc a year and serves roughly two-thirds of the Australian wine industry, turning it into grape spirit, tartaric acid, and tannin extracts that it sells back to wineries. Caviro, an Italian cooperative of about 11,000 grape growers, converts roughly 127,000 tons of pomace and lees into alcohol, tartaric acid, natural colorant, and grape-seed products, and runs its plant on biogas it makes from the residue. Spain's Alvinesa runs a similar integrated operation, aiming to use nearly all of the material.

The lesson is not that Lodi should copy any one of them, but that the volume question has a clear answer: a stream of this size is demonstrably enough to support a real facility. These operations also point to three different ownership models — a private regional processor, a grower-owned cooperative, and an integrated company — that a local effort would have to choose among.

What other California wine regions are doing

California's other wine regions are active with grape biomass, but almost entirely in lower- and mid-value uses. Napa is the furthest along: a local company has composted grape pomace there since the early 1990s, and pomace still makes up around 60 percent of its compost feedstock. Napa is now adding anaerobic digestion — breaking the material down without oxygen to capture biogas — alongside that composting. On the vineyard side, some Napa growers burn pulled vines in low oxygen to make biochar (a charcoal-like soil additive that stores carbon), with help from the local Resource Conservation District.

Sonoma leans into biochar. The Sonoma Biochar Initiative has spent more than 15 years on community-scale production, and a long-running vineyard trial there has become one of the most-cited datasets on biochar in West Coast viticulture. In Mendocino, the Barra of Mendocino winery makes biochar from its own pulled vines and plans to blend it with its pomace. Higher-value uses — extracting oils, polyphenols, or making packaging materials from spent pomace — remain mostly in the research stage in California.

The pattern is consistent: the North Coast keeps grape biomass in compost, soil, biogas, and biochar — all real, all relatively low value. Industrial extraction of tartaric acid, grapeseed oil, and polyphenols at scale remains the province of the overseas operators and one in-state outlier, Polyphenolics in Madera, which already makes grape seed extract from California pomace. That gap is where a Lodi effort could be distinctive — though it is worth noting that even Napa, with a 30-year head start and a wealthy wine economy, has not moved into high-value extraction.

The economics, in rough terms

What a facility would cost and earn depends on a design no one has drawn yet, so any numbers are illustrative. As a rough sketch, a mid-sized pomace plant processing around 40,000 tons a year might cost on the order of $15 million to build, earn somewhere between $8 million and $12 million a year at full operation, and run at an operating margin of a few million dollars annually. On those assumptions, such a plant might cover its operating costs around its third year and pay back the construction cost somewhere in years five to seven, with public incentives potentially shortening that.

The single biggest swing factor is how much tartaric acid the plant actually recovers and sells; the capturable volume of pomace and the share of construction cost covered by grants matter nearly as much. These are not forecasts — they are a way to test whether the idea is worth a proper feasibility study.

On funding, the state programs are the more dependable leg. California offers a sales-tax exclusion on equipment that processes recycled material, grants and low-interest loans through CalRecycle for organics-processing facilities, and per-acre incentives through the Department of Food and Agriculture and the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District for recycling vine wood into the soil. Federal programs — rural energy and value-added producer grants — could help but were unsettled in 2026, so any plan would be safer built on the state programs and product revenue.

Other local players

Beyond BEAM and the Chamber, several other local bodies have adjacent activities or assets, though most have not taken a public position on grape biomass specifically.

  • The City of Lodi. The City adopted an Economic Development Strategic Plan in 2026 that targets high-growth industries for business attraction — a natural place to raise the question. Separately, the City already operates anaerobic digestion at its White Slough facility, supplies recycled water to a 49-megawatt power generator, and handles cannery process water on more than 1,000 city-owned acres — directly relevant infrastructure.
  • The Lodi Winegrape Commission. It runs LODI RULES, California's original sustainable-winegrowing program, which already addresses grape pomace — but as a low-value soil and fertilizer amendment. Its grower-funded, research-oriented structure makes it a natural convener.
  • Pacific Coast Producers. The Lodi-headquartered cannery, already supplying peach pits to a bio-based operation (noted above), is an example of a local processor that could be both a feedstock supplier and a potential partner.
  • San Joaquin County. One of BEAM's three partner counties, through its economic-development function; no county-specific bioeconomy program is yet on the public record.

Open questions and limits

This report raises more questions than it answers, by design. How much pomace could a facility realistically collect within a workable distance? Who would own and run it — a private company, a grower cooperative, or a public-private venture? Would Lodi's wineries commit their pomace under multi-year agreements, the way the overseas operators secure supply? Is there a market and a buyer for the high-value products, and can the carbon side meet certification standards? And the harder question raised by the regional scan: if high-value extraction were straightforward, why has no California region done it at scale?

None of these has an answer yet. The natural next step is a low-cost feedstock inventory and feasibility study, and a round of direct conversations with the organizations above to learn where each stands. Those answers — not this report — would determine whether the opportunity is real.

LodiEye is the investigative research arm of Lodi411.com, a citizen-run civic data and transparency platform serving Lodi, California and San Joaquin County. LodiEye is not a traditional news outlet. It does not employ professional journalists or reporters, and the people behind it do not hold journalism degrees or have professional newsroom experience. LodiEye is best understood as civic research and analysis — not peer journalism — and is not a substitute for the local and regional news organizations that do this work professionally. For traditional reporting on Lodi, San Joaquin County, and the broader region, readers are encouraged to consult the Lodi News-Sentinel, Stocktonia, The Sacramento Bee, CalMatters, and other established news outlets staffed by credentialed journalists.

This LodiEye report was produced using artificial intelligence tools under the direction and review of the founder. Lodi411 uses multiple AI platforms in its research and publication workflow, including Anthropic's Claude (primarily Opus and Sonnet models) and Perplexity AI across a variety of large language models offered by each. These tools were used in the following capacities:

Source Discovery: AI-assisted search identified roughly three dozen sources, including BEAM Circular and California state program pages, grant and air-district documents, peer-reviewed grape-pomace research, company and trade reporting on operating facilities in Australia, Italy, and Spain, and examples from other California wine regions. Perplexity AI was used for initial discovery and real-time retrieval; Claude was used for deeper reading of identified sources.

Credibility Validation: Claims were cross-referenced across independent sources, prioritizing government datasets and program pages, peer-reviewed research, institutional and company disclosures, and trade and news reporting. Multiple AI models independently checked key figures — crush volume, pomace fractions, and facility capacities — and flagged inconsistencies for the editor.

Analysis and Synthesis: Claude Opus and Sonnet assisted in estimating the recurring feedstock from crush and acreage data, comparing Lodi's volume against operating facilities, and organizing the funding landscape and the map of potentially interested local parties.

Presentation: Claude assisted in drafting and structuring the article, preparing the two Kendo UI charts, and keeping the language accessible to a general audience.

Final Review: Multiple AI models reviewed the completed draft for factual consistency, source attribution, and balanced presentation. All editorial judgments and publication decisions were made by the founder.

Lodi411/LodiEye believes transparency about AI use serves both readers and the broader information ecosystem. Readers who spot errors are encouraged to write editor@lodi411.com so corrections can be made.

References

Don Bradford
Next

Warehouse Safety in San Joaquin County: From the Medline Fire to a Regional Crisis