Emerging technologies for the production of nutraceuticals from agricultural by-products: A viewpoint of opportunities and challenges

Abstract

Agricultural by-products were considered for many years as undervalued substrates due to their removal from food production line and the complicated problems arise from their treatment and disposal in the environment. Nowadays, the urgent demands for sustainability in the food and agricultural sectors led to their valorization as a source of nutraceuticals. The latest are typically produced using conventional technologies with well-known technological and scale-up boundaries, which reduce their efficacy and production yield. Emerging technologies promise to overcome these problems, but is this truth? The current viewpoint is trying to answer this question by exploring the possibility of adapting the latest technologies in the recovery downstream processing. Opportunities and challenges in the field are also discussed with a final aim of inspiring researchers to investigate the critical parameters that prevent for the moment the broad commercial implementation of emerging technologies in the particular application. © 2013 The Institution of Chemical Engineers.