Abstract
Food wastes are produced by a variety of sources, ranging from agricultural operations to household consumption. About 38% occurs during food processing. At present, the European Union legislation encourages the exploitation of co-products. This valorisation can be achieved through the extraction of high-value components such as proteins, polysaccharides, fibres, flavour compounds, and phytochemicals, which can be re-used as nutritionally and pharmacologically functional ingredients. Extraction can proceed according to solid-liquid extraction, Soxhlet extraction, pressurized fluid extraction, supercritical fluid extraction, ultrasound-assisted extraction, microwave-assisted extraction, pulsed electric field extraction, and enzyme-assisted extraction. Nevertheless, these techniques cannot be used indiscriminately and their choice depends on the type of biomolecules and matrix, the scale processing (laboratory or industrial), the ratio between production costs and economic values of the compounds to be extracted. The vegetable wastes include trimmings, peelings, stems, seeds, shells, bran, residues remaining after extraction of oil, starch, sugar, and juice. The animal-derived wastes include wastes from bred animals, wastes from seafood, wastes from dairy processing. The recovered biomolecules and by-products can be used to produce functional foods or as adjuvants in food processing or in medicinal and pharmaceutical preparations. This work is an overview of the type and amounts of food wastes; food waste legislation; conventional and novel techniques suitable for extracting biomolecules; food, medicinal and pharmaceutical uses of the recovered biomolecules and by-products, and future trends in these areas.
Highlights
Food wastes are produced by a variety of sources, ranging from agricultural operations to household consumption
Excluding the agricultural food losses, up to 42% of them is produced by households, 38% occurs during food processing, and 20% is distributed along the whole chain [1]
This attitude has recently changed for several reasons including the growing environmental concerns in the European Union; the demand for controls to minimize the impact of waste on human health, which is bringing about more stringent regulations; the high disposal costs that are eroding the already low profits of the food industry and the growing awareness of the benefits deriving from potentially marketable components present in foods wastes and co-products [5]
Summary
Food wastes are produced throughout all the food life cycle. Excluding the agricultural food losses, up to 42% of them is produced by households, 38% occurs during food processing, and 20% is distributed along the whole chain [1]. With reference to the facilities aimed to the recovery of biomolecules from food wastes, the potentially fundable research and innovations actions concern: The isolation of sugars from rejects and side streams of pulp and paper industry and their conversion into added value bio-products such as carbohydrate derivatives (e.g., alcohols, polyols, small organic acids); the development of industrially viable processing concepts for the valorization of protein products from plant residues (e.g., from bioethanol or cereal starch processing industries) fulfilling market requirements in the food segment; the use of meso-organisms to convert agro-based residues (e.g., cereal residues, sugar residues or oil rich plant residues) into highly bioactive protein-rich, lipid-rich and chitin-rich bioactive compounds; the production of functional additives from residues from the agro-food industry [17]
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