Advances in Food, Bioproducts and Natural Byproducts for a Sustainable Future: From Conventional to Innovative Processes

The world population is expected to reach almost 10,000 million in 2050, which entails the need to focus on sustainability and its three pillars: the economy, the environment, and society. Within this context, it is necessary to use our resources efficiently; for instance, we will need to produce much more food using less land and while polluting less to optimize the production of biomass from diversified resources, along with its subsequent conversion, fractionation, and processing. To achieve this, new approaches and processes, with special emphasis from a biotechnological perspective, may need to be implemented to move towards a circular model that will confer environmental sustainability. Global projections of food losses constitute an abundant pool of complex carbohydrates, proteins, lipids, and functional compounds. Hence, the deployment of food waste streams as raw materials will encompass the formulation of added-value products that will be ideally reintroduced in the food supply chain to close the loop. Therefore, the analysis and optimization of any food and bioproduct process, as well as the development of innovative and emerging food and by-product processing methods, are important as a necessity for the sustainable transition to a bioeconomy era. The valorization, bioprocessing, and biorefining of food-industry-based streams, the role of industrial microorganisms, the isolation of high-added-value compounds, applications of the resulting bio-based chemicals in food manufacturing, novel food formulations, economic policies for food waste management, along with sustainability or techno-economic assessment of processing methods constitute subject areas that need to be addressed. More specifically, bioprocess design to valorize food-industry waste and by-product streams should be initiated by characterizing the composition of the onset raw material with the aim of identifying the target end-products, whereas the generation of multiple high-added-value products is a prerequisite for cost-effective processes to establish economic sustainability. On top of that, the feasibility of innovative processes could be sustained by encompassing food applications, driven by the constantly emerging consumers’ demand for functional foods and beverages with enhanced nutritional value. Equally, a growing awareness for bio-based and natural food components is being developed, thereby imposing challenges on the substitution of chemically derived ingredients with their natural counterparts.