Courtesy / YN
Nutritional, functional and technological advantages far above the traditional use of carob.
A carob it is not something that is used in a massive way on the planet.
over here, Portugal is one of the largest carob producers. It was really the world’s largest producer in 2020.
Carob is a centuries-old crop, particularly marked in the Algarve.
Precisely in Portugal, a project emerged to create completely carob-based food products.
It’s called Alphamais – Development of new food preparations and functional ingredients based on carob.
It has the participation of the Superior Institute of Engineering of the University of Algarve, Center for Biotechnology and Fine Chemistry of the Superior School of Biotechnology of the Catholic University of Portugal, Research Center MED – Mediterranean Institute for Agriculture, Environment and Development, and the company Decorgel.
They looked at carob in a global way, creating value in an endogenous product and exploring its technological value, in an approach of all natural transformation.
This Portuguese project, according to information sent to ZAP, transformed you by-products the transformation of carob, promoting its full use in obtaining new Ingredients.
I wanted to raise the potential of carob as a national product and promote its integration into new products as a natural ingredient with high added value.
Main results: “Obtaining new ingredients and functional food preparations, using carob in its entirety, using biotechnological solutions for micronization and compound extraction”.
“Carob by-products were also valued in order to obtain ingredients and functional food preparations, exploring the ingredient in its entirety, in a zero-waste logic”, described Manuela Pintado, researcher at the Center for Biotechnology and Fine Chemistry at the Catholic University of Portugal.
António Nunes, CEO of Decorgel, added that this natural transformation seeks to elevate carob components “to a safe use. nutritional, functional and technological advantages very beyond its traditional usage”.
“This project brought a new vision on products to be developed with this fruit and it was important to study the behavior of this new product in aqueous mixtures and with milk in the presence of sugar”, said Margarida Vieira, MED researcher.
ZAP // 
