Upcycling water from legume processing to meet high demand for plant-based food ingredients: Creating new opportunities for UK legumes

Wet processing of legume seeds such as beans, peas, chickpeas, and lentils, is used commercially to make pre-cooked food products including hummus and canned beans. The cooking water from this process is considered a liquid waste product, but was recently discovered to have useful techno-functional properties like foaming, emulsification and gelling, and given the name 'aquafaba'.

With the plant-based market growing rapidly and expected to reach US$160 billion globally within the next decade, the demand for ingredients to replace egg or dairy protein functionality in a variety of foods, including mayonnaise, cakes and bakery, is higher than ever. Upcycling waste-water from commercial legume processing into aquafaba represents a significant opportunity for sustainable and cost-effective production of vegan alternatives to animal protein.

Despite its potential, the lack of understanding surrounding aquafaba functionality has hindered its widespread adoption by food producers. So far, aquafaba production has mainly been limited to imported chickpeas, while the potential to obtain aquafaba from underutilised UK-grown legumes have been overlooked. Furthermore, factors such as legume variety and processing conditions, which have a big impact on ingredient performance, are still poorly understood.

Thus, although new aquafaba ingredients are emerging, their unpredictable and highly variable performance is a major technical barrier to successful commercial use.

This translational project will address this issue by using recent mechanistic insights to improve the extraction of functionally active components from UK grown legumes into aquafaba, thus delivering more consistent and standardised end-product quality.

Our approach uses infrastructure and mechanistic understanding established in previous work, where we set-up a wet-process to make innovative cellular flours (PulseON®) from a range of different legumes, generating aquafaba as a waste-stream. Here we will use the existing PulseON® wet-processing plants and recent scientific insights to improve the quality and types of aquafaba that can be made from the waste-water generated during manufacture of PulseON® or indeed other cooked legume products.