Concentrated food systems for sustainable membrane-based fractionation processes

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The growing concern about sustainability and environmental impact of industrial food processing opposes new challenges to create high-value food ingredients while using less non-renewable energy, less drinking water, and also, minimizing products losses & waste. Milk-based protein ingredients have been commercialized for decades and technological options to prepare most of individual milk protein in purified form at industrial scale are available. However, all of these approaches are currently requiring the use of some chemicals, but most importantly, they rely on large amounts of water for dilution and/or diafiltration in order to reach the desired degree of protein purity. Nowadays, dairy processors are increasingly pre-concentrating dairy fluids by reverse osmosis (RO) to decrease transportation costs and reduce the volumes involved in downstream processing. While pre-concentration decreases the overall environmental impact, physicochemical and functional properties of concentrated food systems are largely modified.