New Advances in the integrated Management of food processing wAste in India and Europe: use of Sustainable Technologies for the Exploitation of byproducts into new foods and feeds

The European and Indian food industries generate many millions of tons per year of plant processing by-products, particularly in the fruit and cereal processing sectors. These streams are quite unstable, due to their propensity for microbiological spoilage and oxidation, and therefore their valorisation is limited (e.g. use in animal feed and composting) and a large portion of them are disposed in landfill. Such matrices can be sources of valuable food ingredients to be exploited in the production of new foods and feeds, but a very little is known about this possibility. The set up of technologically and economically viable strategies to convert such matrices into new, high value foods and feeds would allow to remarkably increase the sustainability and the competitiveness of the European and Indian food industry. The recently EC-funded FP7 project NAMASTE-EU (Joint EC & DBT-India- call: KBBE-2009-2-7-02: Valorisation of by-products in food processing) aims at developing and assessing laboratory-scale protocols and processes for the sustainable (bio)conversion of citrus and wheat processing by-products into fruit paste, snacks, filler for bakery products and a new feed for aquaculture. The planned RTD activities will be performed in close cooperation with a parallel RTD consortium working in India, i.e., NAMASTE-INDIA, under the coordination of the Department of Biotechnology of the Indian Government. The main objectives of NAMASTE EU are: a) to develop EU-Indian common protocols for the selection, characterization and stabilization of citrus and wheat processing by-products and common physical/chemical and biological procedures for obtaining, from the by-products, bioactive molecules, dietary fibres, prebiotics, fruit paste, biovanillin, etc; b) to build up common EU-Indian protocols and technologies for exploiting the obtained natural ingredients in the formulation of new foods and a new feed for aquaculture of interest for the EU-Indian markets; c) to optimize EU-Indian interdisciplinary procedures for the assessment of the quality, chemical and microbial safety of developed new foods and feed, and the environmental and economical sustainability of the processes employed; and d ) to develop EU-Indian common strategies for the analysis of risks, economical benefits and new market opportunities for the new foods/feeds and the developed technologies. The following project outcomes are expected: a) development of economically and environmentally transnational sustainable strategies for the industrial valorisation of fruit and cereal processing industry by-products; b) generation of a common India/EU’s knowledge-base and combined vision in the area of environmentally sound food production technologies and c) potential of setting up new joint ventures and, on a longer term, of better accessing to new and major food markets as a result of the increased collaboration between Industries joining the EU and Indian consortia.