From the Food Research, Development and Evaluation Laboratory (LIDEA), which depends on the Faculty of Biochemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences of the UNR and Conicet, they develop products with nutritional value from waste from the food industry.

One of the lines in which LIDEA is currently working is whey, a waste product from the cheese industry. “To produce one kilo of cheese, ten liters of milk are needed and nine liters of whey are generated, which are discarded,” explain researchers Darío Spelzini and Valeria Boeris.

Since the province of Santa Fe is a dairy basin, it produces a large amount of this effluent that contains proteins and that can be recovered to make other foods and, in turn, reduce the environmental impact of disposing of it. This whey has two nutritionally very rich proteins, alpha-lactalbumin and beta-lactoglobulin, which are also used by athletes to increase muscle mass and for intravenous nutrition. 

Through a simple process, scientists recover the proteins from this whey and produce a wet concentrate that can later be used as an ingredient in breads, cheeses, desserts, dairy products and ice creams, giving it extra nutritional value. It can also be used as a milk replacement for the production of lactal bread.

The team of researchers, with more than ten years of experience in whey protein recovery methodologies, has an agreement with a cheese industry in the city of San Nicolás, to carry out this development. This public-private articulation is in the “escalation” stage, that is, taking the project from a laboratory scale to an industrial one.

Doctors in biological sciences explain that large companies use filtration and ultrafiltration systems that allow these proteins to be recovered and then sold. And others use this whey to make ricotta, but small and medium-sized companies, due to the volume they handle daily and the costs, cannot access that technology.  

Taking into account the context, UNR teachers developed this innovative process, testing it in different conditions and polymers until optimizing it with the available technology. “What we did was look for the conditions that facilitate the interaction between the polymer and whey proteins and then scale it for the volumes that these companies handle,” says Spelzini.

The problem, as Boeris clarifies, is that proteins are good but their taste is not pleasant. So, once they got the concentrate, the challenge was to see where they could use it. This is how they tested it in breads, spreadable cheeses, and ice creams, starting with more similar matrices and where they believed it would be able to be integrated more easily, in addition to adding value.

Apart from the use and evaluation of whey, this Laboratory also works on other by-products of the food industry such as yerba mate stick, brewer's bagasse, protein derivatives of spirulina and apple peel or discarded products, such as fine fruits that by their appearance cannot be marketed. It should be noted that the volume generated from this waste is very important and its disposal has a negative impact on the environment.

Using different techniques, scientists recover bioactive compounds (antioxidants) or nutrients of interest (proteins, fat or fiber) or transform them through fermentation to obtain ingredients for use in human nutrition. For example, from brewer's bagasse flour, they recover the proteins and incorporate them as an ingredient in vegan sausages. They also use flour as an ingredient in breads and snacks.

These tasks of extraction and stabilization of bioactive compounds and their incorporation into certain foods give them added value and replace artificial additives. To achieve this, researchers use green and scalable technologies in order to avoid environmental pollution, excessive energy costs and costly unit operations. "These extracts have antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, hypoglycemic bioactivities, among others, and, in some cases, they can replace artificial coloring," they highlight.

These processes are carried out on red fruits to add to yogurt, on the spirulina microalgae for yogurt, frozen yogurt, gelatin, creams, cake toppers, gummies. Also from apple peel, yerba mate residue and vinal leaves, a legume native to the NOA and NEA. This is industrially underutilized since its leaves are used in traditional medicine as anti-inflammatories.

In addition, they work with microorganisms fermenting different food products. For example, to obtain legume flours, solid-state fermentation is used to reduce the content of heat-resistant antinutrients in different legumes. In this way, the digestibility of these flours is improved, as well as their sensory acceptance, which allows obtaining ingredients based on chickpeas, lentils or peas that are incorporated into traditional breads and muffins or those without TACC.

Likewise, submerged fermentation is used to obtain biomass from liquid byproducts, such as the lactose solution that remains after recovering the proteins. They are also dedicated to the reduction of critical nutrients in foods, which consists of replacing animal fats with vegetable oils and reducing the sugar and salt content in mass consumption foods.

Journalist: Victoria Arrabal