Selection of a Sustainable Functional Pasta Enriched with Opuntia Using ELECTRE III Methodology

Abstract

Abstract:In the last decade, the nutritional and health benefits of Opuntia (Opuntia ficus-indica (L.) Mill.) were discussed by academic scientists and private companies. In particular, the introduction of this substance in frequently consumed foods, like, for example, pasta and bakery products, could have a wide diffusion due to its rich composition in polyphenols, vitamins, polyunsaturated fatty acids, and amino acids. The identified natural cactus compounds are responsible for biologically relevant activities including anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, hypoglycemic, antimicrobial, and neuro-protective properties. The aim of this paper is the evaluation of the best combination of Opuntia quantity and process parameters (recipe) for the production of sustainable functional pasta. The results obtained show that the new functional pasta guarantees the presence of the Opuntia quantity necessary to be considered a healthy food without altering the organoleptic and physical properties of the final product. An important indicator of a sustainable food product is its capacity to contribute to public health while maintaining a high quality of the final product. The selection of the optimal recipe was carried out by means of a multi-criteria decision-making procedure, ELECTRE III. Finally, a sensitivity analysis was conducted to assess the stability of the obtained solutions varying the ELECTRE III thresholds, showing that the results obtained are stable under uncertain conditions. Food productions are often affected by qualitative judgments in terms of physical and organoleptic properties of the final product, making the ELECTRE III particularly suitable in an industrial application in which different points of view are involved.

Selecting a Public Service Outsourcer Based on the Improved ELECTRE II Method with Unknown Weight Information under a Double Hierarchy Hesitant Linguistic Environment

“…Next, we calculate the distance between the DHHFLEs in with those in h S φ * and h S φ − ; the results are shown in Tables 11 and 12, respectively. Then, the relative distance d, defined in [33], can be obtained by the following equation:…”

“…After being meticulously probed and extended by a range of specialists, the method further evolved into the ELECTRE family, including ELECTRE I, ELECTRE II, ELECTRE III, and so on. Among them, the ELECTRE I method is suitable for constructing a partial prioritization and for choosing a set of promising alternatives [32], the ELECTRE III method aims to distribute each potential alternative into one of the categories in a previously defined family [33]. Compared with them, the ELECTRE II method [34] is a more pragmatic approach for handling the problem of ranking alternatives from the best to the worst [35,36], which is more suitable for selecting the outsourcer in practical applications.…”

Biomass Production from Crops Residues: Ranking of Agro-Energy Regions

“…ELECTRE III is a well-known multicriteria method widely chosen in the international literature [28,29]. This method requires the determination of prices of three thresholds of the criteria which are used as the indifference threshold, preference threshold and the veto threshold [30].…”

Perception of Older Adults about Health-Related Functionality of Foods Compared with Other Age Groups

“…The first consumer studies related to functional foods tried to explore the effect of socio-demographics factors [27][28][29], attitudinal profiles and motivations [21,[30][31][32][33][34], and reactions connected to health and nutrition claims [35][36][37][38]. Based on the results of the studies that focused on the concept of functional foods in general, later studies targeted more specific product categories and novel concepts [39][40][41][42][43][44]. It also means that the focus shifted to market-related surveys and product development aspects.…”