According to the Food Wastage Footprint and Climate Change Report, about 15% of all fruits and 25% of all vegetables are wasted at the base of the food production chain. The significant losses and wastes in the fresh and processing industries is becoming a serious environmental issue, mainly due to the microbial degradation impacts. There has been a recent surge in research and innovation related to food, packaging, and pharmaceutical applications to address these problems. The underutilized wastes (seed, skin, rind, and pomace) potentially present good sources of valuable bioactive compounds, including functional nutrients, amylopectin, phytochemicals, vitamins, enzymes, dietary fibers, and oils. Fruit and vegetable wastes (FVW) are rich in nutrients and extra nutritional compounds that contribute to the development of animal feed, bioactive ingredients, and ethanol production. In the development of active packaging films, pectin and other biopolymers are commonly used. In addition, the most recent research studies dealing with FVW have enhanced the physical, mechanical, antioxidant, and antimicrobial properties of packaging and biocomposite systems. Innovative technologies that can be used for sensitive bioactive compound extraction and fortification will be crucial in valorizing FVW completely; thus, this article aims to report the progress made in terms of the valorization of FVW and to emphasize the applications of FVW in active packaging and biocomposites, their by-products, and the innovative technologies (both thermal and non-thermal) that can be used for bioactive compounds extraction.

Coffee roasting produces several hundreds of aroma compounds that affect its quality. A good roasting model can not only help to control the required energy to reduce the process cost, but also ensure the product quality by cooperating with process analytical technologies and model predictive control strategies. However, current coffee roasting models are limited to constant heating temperature application due to high computational cost. Current research is developing a 2D roasting model of a single bean under varying heating profiles and is comparing it with the commonly used 3D model. The 2D model is designed to achieve minimum discrepancies with experimental data using estimated parameters of the bean's thermal conductivity and moisture diffusivity. The model performance showed that the 2D model was able to solve much faster than a 3D model, while the absolute difference in the bean temperature prediction between these two models was less than 5°C. The proposed 2D model shows potential in monitoring the roasted coffee bean quality, where it can provide a cost efficient and reliable bean temperature prediction. Practical applications The application of varying heating profiles can optimize the flavor of roasted coffee beans. This study had developed a 2D model that can efficiently simulate under varying heating conditions. The 2D model also provides comparable accuracy to the 3D model and therefore, proving of its potential to be used in the modeling of batch coffee roasting.

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Reconstituted pomegranate juice (RPJ) was thermally treated with high-temperature pasteurisation (HTP) at 95°C and mild-temperature pasteurisation (MTP) at 80°C for 30 s respectively. As a comparison, the effect on physicochemical properties, including antioxidant activities and microbial inactivation was eavluated. Both MTP and HTP showed effective inactivation of microbial growth to negligible level with MTP taking almost half pasteurisation-time (-46.3%) as compared to HTP, indicating possible less energy usage. MTP and HTP treatment delivered insignificant difference in pH, titratable acidity, total soluble solids and colour changes (ΔE) based on Commission Internationale de l’Elcairage (CIE) colour system. A significantly higher CIE a values and reduction in L and b were obtained for MTP-juice indicating an increase in red tonalities due to increase in anthocyanin contents. As for antioxidant activity and extractability of bioactive compound, interestingly HTP delivered better results due to more phenols and anthocyanin were released during the heating, leading to further release of initially membrane‐bound phenols. These findings suggested that both HTP and MTP are able to meet the microbiological safety and comparable physicochemical qualities. Nonetheless, HTP has shown higher functional values due to higher extractability of antioxidant compounds.

Paperboard box produced in large volume for packaging purpose either to pack light or heavy product. When a heavy product is packed, high strength and structural stability against compression and deformation of the paperboard box are demanded. This paper investigates the effects of different shape of fluting mediums on the von Mises stress and deformation using finite element analysis (FEA) tool. Solidworks and ANSYS software were used to design a 3-D model and perform static structural analysis, respectively. The result from the analysis and simulation revealed that common s-shape geometry experienced the lowest von Mises stress and deformation. Honeycomb geometry experienced the highest von Mises stress of 0.19576 MPa while triangle fluting medium recorded the highest deformation at 1.8695E-4mm.