New food products and ingredients: how can pressurized fluids contribute to the valorization of Brazilian biomes?

Abstract

The main current challenges in the food field include the search for a healthy diet, clean and sustainable processes with reduced environmental impact. Some trends have been observed in this context, such as the substitution of artificial ingredients by natural ones, the increase of vegetable protein market, the recovery of by-products and, for all these cases, the valorization of local natural resources. Brazilian diverse biomes offer still poorly explored alternatives in this field. The Laboratory of High Pressure in Food Engineering (LAPEA) has focused its activities on the investigation of high-pressure processes to obtain value-added products from natural sources. Results have been showing that food industry by-products are important sources of macronutrients and bioactive compounds, and high-pressure technologies can be viable to recover and purify these compounds by methods that are clean and non-aggressive to both environment and product itself. Therefore, this project will explore the recovery of processing by-products from three typically Brazilian fruits: guarana, cocoa, and tucumã-do-Amazonas. The peels generated by these fruits' processing will be subjected to supercritical CO2 and pressurized liquid extraction from the recovery of essential oil, phenolic compounds, and alkaloids (guarana); oil, phenolic compounds, alkaloids, and pectin (cocoa); oil, carotenoids, and phenolic compounds (tucumã-do-Amazonas). Supercritical impregnation in polymeric matrices will be applied to the extracts obtained from these by-products. The proteins contained in these materials will be concentrated and subjected to modification using supercritical CO2, to improve their properties for application in food formulation. The processing conditions will be evaluated in terms of target compound yield, physical and chemical properties of the products, process kinetics and economic viability. Applications in formulated products will be searched in partnership with research groups and industries. (AU)