ABSTRACT
Food wastes are generated by all the food life cycles ranging from farm production to consumer consumption. Only food processing industries generate huge amount of waste worldwide throughout the year. Along with loss of valuable compounds, food wastes generate severe management problems, both from the environmental and economic point of view. The best way of utilization of this waste is extraction of useful compounds such as phenolic acids, flavonoids, proteins and dietary fiber etc. These compounds can be reused in various products due to their health promoting potential in reducing aging, oxidative stress, and preventing various diseases. For recovering functional molecules from food industry wastes membrane-based technologies are emerging tool. To date, ultrafiltration process becomes a necessity in the field of food science and technology for separation and concentration of compounds food wastes. Owing to various benefits like low energy requirement, gentle product treatment and high selectivity over conventional separation processes, this technique has been most commonly applied in food processing industries like fruit and vegetable, dairy, beverage, fish, and meat industry. However, membrane fouling is a major problem associated with ultrafiltration as it reduces the performance and therefore increases the cost. Current studies show that steps taken by researches and scientist in this direction are helpful in improving ultrafiltration, mainly focusing on cleaning of fouled membranes and membrane fouling control. Thus, the present chapter provides a complete overview concerning application in various food processing fields for recovery of high-added-value compounds from different food waste streams, fouling problems associated with ultrafiltration membranes and recent developments.
