Upcycling pea waste side streams for developing future food ingredients

Abstract

Every year in the EU, 15% of peas processed by the food industry is wasted since damaged, accounting for 0.135 million tons/year of pea waste. Current pea waste management (anaerobic digestion) leads to loss of valuable fractions of proteins, carbohydrates and fibers, which still have nutritional value and functional properties similar to those of fresh pea. UPea aims to develop innovative, zero-waste transformation pathways of pea waste for the production of valuable ingredients for human consumption. UPea specific objectives are: 1) to develop lab scale processes and strategies to increase pea waste stability overtime, and the extraction efficiency of nutritional components while non altering their properties; 2) to develop novel, safe food ingredients with high technological and nutritional properties; 3) to assess the feasibility of the proposed new processes and products for further pea waste industrial exploitation. Innovative green technologies and processes will be developed and applied to pea waste, and their performances compared to traditional processes. Stability, drying and protein extraction efficiency will be increased by non-thermal treatment using high-pressure carbon dioxide and electrical stresses. Flour and protein ingredients will be obtained using traditional or innovative techniques and fractionation. The new ingredients will be characterized for chemical composition and food-related functional properties in order to map their performances in a wide range of food product categories. A feasibility study aiming at identifying i)hurdles in terms of process scalability, ii) food safety, and iii)law restrictions will be carried out. The project can count on a multidisciplinary, inter-institutional research team, composed of three units (UNIUD, UNIPR, UNIPD) coordinated by young researchers (under 40) with strong, consolidated and internationally recognized expertise in food technology, food chemistry, food engineering and food safety. UPea project will provide innovative and sustainable alternative solutions to the current pea waste management, which will pave the way for the definition of industrial cascade bio-refinery processes aiming at exploiting pea waste into a source of value ingredients for the food industry

Team di ricerca UNIBO

Alessandro Zambon, Carmine D'Agostino, Serena Bandini, Marco Giacinti Baschetti, Ferruccio Doghieri

Partner di progetto

Università di Udine, Università di Parma

Link a sito progetto

https://www.linkedin.com/company/upea-project/?viewAsMember=true