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Orientador(es)
Resumo(s)
The food industry generates large volumes of nutrient-rich by-products that remain underutilised despite their considerable biochemical potential. These materials originate predominantly from the fruit and vegetable, dairy, meat, and fish and seafood sectors and represent a substantial opportunity for sustainable valorisation. Fermentation has emerged as a powerful platform for converting such by-products into high-value ingredients, including bioactive compounds, functional metabolites, enzymes, antimicrobials, and nutritionally enriched fractions. This review synthesises recent advances in microbial fermentation strategies—spanning lactic acid bacteria, filamentous fungi, yeasts, and mixed microbial consortia—and highlights their capacity to enhance the bioavailability, stability, and functionality of recovered compounds across diverse substrate streams. Key technological enablers, including substrate pre-treatments, precision fermentation, omics-guided strain selection and improvement, and bioprocess optimisation, are examined within the broader framework of circular bioeconomy integration. Despite significant scientific progress, major challenges remain, particularly related to substrate heterogeneity, process scalability, regulatory alignment, safety assessment, and consumer acceptance. The review identifies critical research gaps and future directions, emphasising the need for standardised analytical frameworks, harmonised compositional databases, AI-driven fermentation control, integrated biorefinery concepts, and pilot-scale validation. Overall, the evidence indicates that integrated fermentation-based approaches—especially those combining complementary by-product streams, tailored microbial consortia, and system-level process integration—represent the most promising pathway toward the scalable, sustainable, and economically viable valorisation of food industry by-products.
Descrição
The authors acknowledge financial support from FCT, through the strategic project UIDB/04035/2025 granted to the GeoBioTec Research Institute and IDfoods project: Food System of The Future—Research and Development in Sustainable Agrifood Systems and Healthy Nutrition, with the reference POCI-01-0247FEDER-039364 supported and financed by the Competitiveness and Internationalization Operational Program (POCI), within the scope of COMPETE2020.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2026 by the authors.
Palavras-chave
bioprocess optimisation circular bioeconomy food-industry by-products microbial biotransformation sustainable food systems Food Science Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology (miscellaneous) Plant Science