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. Although the recovery of value fractions from pea waste has attracted research attention, the industrial exploitation has not been taken into consideration. The key challenges for the industrial exploitation of pea waste have been identified as 1) low storage stability of the waste (few days), 2) absence of process optimization aiming at obtaining value ingredients (flours and proteins), 3) lack of information on process scalability and applicability of the new ingredients in foods. UPea aims to develop innovative, zero-waste transformation pathways of pea waste for the production of valuable ingredients for human consumption. The ingredient development, achieved at lab scale, will pose a solid background for future scale up of the process. UPea objectives are: 1) to develop 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 (evaporative drying) or innovative (supercritical drying) techniques and fractionation (membrane filtration). 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. Using the outputs of the previous tasks, a feasibility study, aiming at identifying hurdles in terms of process scalability, food safety, and law restrictions, will be carried out. The project can count on a multidisciplinary, inter-institutional research team, composed of three units (UNIUD, UNIPR, UNIBO) 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.
Dettagli del progetto
Responsabile scientifico: Alessandro Zambon
Strutture Unibo coinvolte:
Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile, Chimica, Ambientale e dei Materiali
Contributo totale Unibo: Euro (EUR) 66.777,00
Durata del progetto in mesi: 24
Data di inizio
12/10/2023
Data di fine:
12/10/2025
