Sustainable and Circular Food Innovation—The CeTA Experience

Abstract

Worldwide, around a third of loss and waste is generated at different stages of the food transformation chain, generating relevant economic, social, and environmental impacts, and increases in the water footprint, emission of greenhouse gases, pressure on the use of arable land, production costs, and decrease in the availability of food for the population. These reasons make imperative the implementation of strategies that minimize the generation of these losses. The Chilean “Technology Center for Food Innovation” (Centro Tecnológico para la Innovación Alimentaria—CeTA), aware of this problem, is contributing to the development of innovative products where materials that are considered waste or by-products from processes in the food, agriculture, cattle raising, and aquaculture industry are reused, or raw materials that do not meet commercial standards, taking advantage of their properties and bioactive compounds, turning them into value propositions that have circular economy components. Examples of these products developed in CeTA include soups, fruit purees, snacks, baked products, food ingredients, and breakfast cereals that contain valued raw materials such as barley bagasse, defatted coconut flour, fruit pomaces, discarded meats, quinoa grown in lagging areas of Chile, as well as stems, leaves, and fruit and vegetable peels, thus generating an environmental, economic, and social impact.