Upcycling gets an upgrade | Food Business News

NAAS, IRELAND — Upcycling may become more widespread across the food and beverage industry as the process gains recognition as a cost-savings and value-adding measure for more volatile supply chains.

“Upcycling historically has been for sustainability purposes, but I think with the resource challenges that we are seeing upcycling is not just for that,” said Zareena Valappil, PhD, vice president of global citrus at Kerry. “For me, it is an innovation space where we are looking at other side streams, which were historically considered as waste, where we can upcycle them to create value-added products.”

Valappil said Kerry is putting upcycling to the test in the citrus segment, where growing challenges have led to significant reductions in output. For instance, in Florida, one of the main producers of oranges for fruit and juice applications, orange production has declined approximately 92% over the last two decades, according to the US Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. Plant diseases and hurricanes are among the primary causes of the output decline.

“Citrus is very sensitive to weather, so if you get very high temperatures or very short cold seasons during the maturing season of the citrus groves, early fruit drop can happen,” Valappil said. “When (early) drop situations happen, we see the total number of crop that’s available from a certain grove during that year drops as well.”

Infected trees

However, the most important factor in the citrus decline is citrus greening disease, Valappil said. The disease comes from a bacterium that is carried by the citrus psyllid, a small plant-feeding insect.

“When it infects the tree, the citrus grove, the bacterium constricts the phloem,” she said. “That’s the nutritional channel of the tree, so the tree is not able to absorb nutrition and is not able to provide you with mature fruit. So, the citrus fruits that are growing on these groves, they are not fully developed. They are very sour, (there’s) less sweetness, even the flavor profile is not fully developed.”

Amid the various production issues facing the citrus supply chain, Kerry has explored upcycling as a method to improve the supply availability and stability of certain citrus ingredients. The company has identified byproducts and molecules that can be upcycled into natural citrus solutions, such as turning pulp waste into fiber texturing agents in dairy alternatives and sauces or extracting leftover taste molecules from peel waste.

“What we do with our extraction capability is identify what are the good products in there, and we extract those out and concentrate them into upcycled or value-added materials, which can be used in delivering the citrus taste,” Valappil said.

Citrus extenders

One cost-saving measure that Kerry has developed is a line of citrus extenders, a flavor solution that offers a one-to-one replacement for citrus oils.

“Citrus flavors typically depend on a lot of the citrus oils, which comes from processing of the fruit, and with the challenges of greening … the citrus oil quality is declining, availability is declining, as well as the price of these products are high,” Valappil said. “To mitigate that, we have developed these sustainable citrus extenders, which incorporate upcycled materials as well as materials from biotechnology.”

Photo: ©JACKF – STOCK.ADOBE.COM

Another upcycling application is Kerry’s JuiceXcel system. The platform uses an upcycled concentrated juice solution and the company’s existing taste technologies to replicate the mouthfeel, taste, aroma and acidity of citrus juice concentrates. The solution can result in an up to 40% reduction in carbon emissions, 60% less water use, and 40% reduction in sugar and caloric content, according to Kerry.

“JuiceXcel is a very concentrated system, so it’s not like a one-to-one use level as a regular or FTNF (from the named fruit) juice concentrate, and because it’s concentrated, its use level is lower in applications,” Valappil said. “So, if you’re replacing 50% of juice, you only need 5% to 10% of JuiceXcel in that beverage, and therefore it helps in reducing the sugar content of that product, thereby reducing the calorie input into that final beverage.”

Alongside the citrus segment, upcycling has gained momentum in other vulnerable supply chains, such as cocoa.

“We’ve seen that there’ve been other areas where these types of technologies have been used, especially in cocoa, where people have looked at upcycling the byproducts after extraction of cocoa extracts,” Valappil said. “Obviously, it has a broader scope across different other vulnerable crops as well.”

Valappil noted that while upcycling has great potential for alleviating some supply chain issues, the practice is not a full-scale solution to the issues facing citrus.

“Upcycling is a very relevant and powerful and strong tool, but it doesn’t solve all the problems that we have,” she said. “Upcycling is more for improving resource utilization, but it cannot completely offset the challenges of supply shortage or quality impact that’s currently impacting citrus fruits.”