Natural Deep Eutectic Solvents and their Potential Application in Food Industry

Abstract

The food industry faces the challenges of sustainable production due to high negative impact of the food industry on the environment and increasing demand for food products due to rising World population. To tackle such challenges food industry requires development of innovative and eco-friendly solutions to exploit agro-food waste and by-products as natural resources for the next generation of nutraceuticals, functional food products, bioenergy, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and other high value-added products. These solutions should also be aligned with the principles of “green chemistry”1. One of the potential solutions could be the usage of natural deep eutectic solvents (NADES) composed only of edible, recyclable, less or nontoxic compounds which are predominantly present in nature1/2/3. More precisely, organic acids, water, sugars, fatty acids, organic salts, amino acids, terpenes, alcohols, and other compounds which are already utilized by the food industry, can be mixed in the appropriate ratio to generate solvents with specific features suitable for a wide range of applications in the food industry3. Since large number of possible NADES combinations can be designed these solvents could be utilized as a medium for chemical reactions (e.g. hydrolysis), extraction medium for natural polar or non-polar compounds (e.g. polyphenols, carotenoids), stabilization medium of extracted compounds etc 1/2/3/4. Due to NADES edible and nontoxic properties obtained extracts are ready-to-use and in certain cases may be applied in food products without additional separation technology which reduces cost of food production. One of the examples is application of NADES to recover polyphenols from food by-products such are raspberry seeds and wild thyme herbal dust and extracts direct incorporation in functional ice tea like beverages 1/2/5.