Chapter 15 - Solid-State Fermentation for Food Applications

Abstract

The consumer society is demanding products with a 100% natural label, therefore the industry is concerned about finding a productive process that provides these items. Under this premise, the use of solid-state fermentation (SSF) to obtain natural compounds instead of a chemical productive process is a reliable alternative. This chapter shows the potential application of SSF for the production of food, brewed foods, and several metabolites of great interest to the food industry, including enzymes, preservatives, flavoring and coloring agents, beverages, and food condiments. A complete revision from the well-known processes implemented at industrial scale such as beverage production, until new processes that are in their infancy are presented and described. The use of new microorganisms (isolated or recombinant) with high yields, valorization of residues as substrates, optimization operational parameters, or hybrid fermentation procedures are presented as interesting approaches for enhancing SSF in order to establish it as a competitive process for food industry application. Finally, this chapter also highlights that the necessity of research in order to carry out the scale-up of most described SSF processes is latent.