Abstract
Cereals have been one of the major food resources for human diets and animal feed for thousands of years, and a large quantity of by-products is generated throughout the entire processing food chain, from farm to fork. These by-products mostly consist of the germ and outer layers (bran) derived from dry and wet milling of the grains, of the brewers’ spent grain generated in the brewing industry, or comprise other types obtained from the breadmaking and starch production industries. Cereal processing by-products are an excellent low-cost source of various compounds such as dietary fibres, proteins, carbohydrates and sugars, minerals and antioxidants (such as polyphenols and vitamins), among others. Often, they are downgraded and end up as waste or, in the best case, are used as animal feed or fertilizers. With the increase in world population coupled with the growing awareness about environmental sustainability and healthy life-styles and well-being, the interest of the industry and the global market to provide novel, sustainable and innovative solutions for the management of cereal-based by-products is also growing rapidly. In that respect, these promising materials can be valorised by applying various biotechnological techniques, thus leading to numerous economic and environmental advantages as well as important opportunities towards new product development (NPD) in the food and feed industry and other types such as chemical, packaging, nutraceutical (dietary supplements and food additives), cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries. This review aims at giving a scientific overview of the potential and the latest advances on the valorisation of cereal-based by-products and wastes. We intended it to be a reference document for scientists, technicians and all those chasing new research topics and opportunities to explore cereal-based by-products through a circular economy approach.
Highlights
A society without hunger but with quality and safe food for all is one of the largest challenges for humanity
It was established that the bioprocessing increased the protein and fat content in the isolates, while additional proteins were identified by the electrophoretic pattern of the protein isolate bioprocessed with enzymes [158]
Besides the environmental and economic aspects, discarded cereal- and pseudocereal-based by-products represent an important loss of valuable biomass and nutrients, including many biochemical compounds such as edible fibres, hemicelluloses, β-glucans, resistant starch, arabinoxylans, mono, di, oligo- and polysaccharides and other carbohydrates, proteins, bioactive peptides, amino acids and enzymes, lipids, polyphenols and other bioactive phytochemicals, vitamins, minerals and other micronutrients, nucleic acids, etc
Summary
A society without hunger but with quality and safe food for all is one of the largest challenges for humanity. It has been calculated that 1.3 billion tons of food loss and waste are generated every year from all stages of the food manufacturing process, food production and consumption [1]. Foods 2020, 9, 1243 the world’s soil has been lost in the last 40 years, 2.3 billion square kilometres of land area are being degraded and almost 5 million of people died from hunger just in 2020 [2] These losses result from the whole food (and feed) value chain, i.e., from the harvest step, passing through the postharvest processing, industrial processing and commercialization, to the final consumption by the consumers (transportation, storage, home processing and waste). The negative impact of these losses is even greater if the required inputs such as land, energy and water resources are taken into consideration
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