Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year. (2017-2018 to 2022-2023)

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.

The long-term goal of our research program aims at understanding and using specific physicochemical characteristics of concentrated systems to develop new processing approaches for the fractionation of complex protein mixtures. It is our hypothesis that membrane separation can be used to design concentrates in which different phenomena such as solubility changes, protein aggregation, lipid-protein interactions and salts precipitation can be enhanced/controlled and used as separation aid to improve fractionation processes.

1) To characterize the changes in physicochemical properties such as protein solubility, aggregation and protein-protein interaction in highly-concentrated systems.

2) To identify the physicochemical conditions that enhance protein destabilization or polymerization of some of whey components and enables their separation;

3) To identify combinations of concentration-diafiltration and diafiltration modes to optimize purification;

4) Apply the strategy developed for whey proteins to casein concentrates for the separation of individual caseins.

Sustainable alternatives for improving the manufacture of dairy-based ingredients will be generated by our research program. By combining fundamental and applied research, this program will provide unique training opportunities for highly-qualified personnel who will benefit from a unique research environment at STELA Dairy research Center and contacts with the dairy industry.