Functional foods based on the recovery of bioactive ingredients from food and algae by-products by emerging extraction technologies and 3D printing

Financiado para publicación en acceso aberto: Universidade de Vigo/CISUG3D food printing is an emerging technology developed to facilitate the life of consumers and food enterprises. This technology allows to obtain any type of new foods according to our wishes. It is possible to develop a food with the exact nutritive value necessary for our body, with the most benefiting nutrients we want, or without any ingredients that we have an allergy, and even predict or personalize the taste, the color, the shape, and the size of a food. Therefore, 3D food printing is considered a promising strategy for developing healthy foods. On the other hand, many foods enterprises release high amounts of waste from their processing activities. These wastes contain many bioactive ingredients such as polyphenols, carotenoids, vitamins, minerals, fibers, unsaturated fatty acids, among others, which have physiological and health benefits. Similarly, several bioactive compounds have been identified in algae. They can be extracted by conventional methods with solvents such as water, ethanol, methanol, chloroform, acetone, and many others, but with some limits like environmental contamination, human toxicity, and low extraction rate. For these reasons, it will be interesting to use emerging extraction technologies to recover bioactive compounds and use them in a 3D food printer to make functional foods that can bring a targeted health benefit to consumers