Fruit and vegetable waste management and the challenge of fresh-cut salad

Abstract

The fruit and vegetable sector generates large amounts of waste. In industrialized countries, fruit and vegetable waste (FVW) is mainly generated before reaching consumers, due to programmed overproduction and unfulfillment of retailer quality standards. FVW poses environmental problems due to its high biodegradability, represents a loss of valuable biomass and an economic cost for companies. Different reduction, reuse and recycle strategies to tackle FVW have been proposed.This review paper summarizes these strategies, underlying their main advantages and pitfalls. In particular, fresh-cut salad waste was considered as a particularly challenging FVW, due to its low concentration of nutrients (e.g. polyphenols, pigments, fiber).Different management strategies can be successfully applied to FVW. Among them, the extraction of specific functional compounds was found to be one of the most studied in the last years. This suggests that FVW can be considered a source of valuable ingredients and products. To maximally exploit these FVW potentialities, a rational strategy is required. The latter should be developed using a step-procedure including waste characterization, output definition, process design and feasibility study. The application of this procedure to the case of fresh-cut salad waste was presented. Based on the review of currently applied and potential salad waste management strategies, an operational scheme for the development of alternative strategies was proposed. This scheme considers the exploitation of traditional and novel technologies, even applied in combination, for salad waste valorization.