Croatian Academy of Engineering (HATZ)
2017
Vol. 12(1) 2017 - 20 pages - English
Food producers are meeting numerous challenges nowadays, starting from increasing world population, eating habits, climatic changes, use of agricultural products in energy production, migration, increasing energy costs etc.
Along with all these challenges and limited resources, food producers are obliged to produce sufficient quantities of safe and high quality food for the increasing world population. On the other hand, food industry generates large quantities of by-products that represent a large environmental problem, solved in most cases through landfills, composting, or animal feed.
A large quantity of contemporary research deals with this issue and the top subject of many documents is the utilization of food industry by-products as potential raw materials for food. The reasons for this include the fact that many by-products contain a variety of nutrients, making them valuable as raw materials in the production and development of new products, among other reasons such as increasing food prices, large quantities of generated by-products, increasing cost of waste management, and increasing environmental concerns. Maintaining the quality of a product requires constant generation of certain quantities of by-products. These quantities are constantly growing, as the result of the increasing food production. The application of food industry by-products in food production results in various changes in products, depending on both the properties of the by-product, which includes the mode of application, and production conditions. To develop a product with desirable organoleptic characteristics, one has to know the properties of the raw materials and processes, and how to adjust recipes and introduce new technologies and/or processes, in order to obtain products as similar to the original as possible. During the realization of the project Application of Food Industry By-products in the Development of Functional and Environmentally Friendly Extruded Food Products and Additives (funded by the Croatian Science Foundation), we used raw materials and technologies that enabled us to develop products with increased nutritional value and desirable organoleptic characteristics. ”Green” technologies (supercritical CO2 extraction, extrusion with supercritical CO2) were used in by-product preparation and product finalization in order to obtain safe, high quality products and modified half-products that may be used in food production.