New advances in the integrated management of food processing by-products in Europe: sustainable exploitation of fruit and cereal processing by-products with the production of new food products (NAMASTE EU)

By-products generated every year by the European fruit and cereal processing industry currently exceed several million tons. They are disposed of mainly through landfills and thus are largely unexploited sources of several valuable biobased compounds potentially profitable in the formulation of novel food products. The opportunity to design novel strategies to turn them into added value products and food ingredients via novel and sustainable processes is the main target of recently EC-funded FP7 project NAMASTE-EU. NAMASTE-EU aims at developing new laboratory-scale protocols and processes for the exploitation of citrus processing by-products and wheat bran surpluses via the production of ingredients useful for the formulation of new beverage and food products. Among the main results achieved in the first two years of the project, there are the development and assessment of procedures for the selection, stabilization and the physical/biological treatment of citrus and wheat processing by-products, the obtainment and recovery of some bioactive molecules and ingredients and the development of procedures for assessing the quality of the obtained ingredients and for their exploitation in the preparation of new food products.