General Specifications for microalgae to be used in food applications

After inventarising and identifying several algae species and their properties, it was time to select those we wanted to include in our project and further investigate their potential for food or feed applications, or both.

As an illustration, these are some specification types used for the selection of microalgae species used to create food applications:

• Technical specifications:
  • What level of purity is required? In other words, how free of contaminants (like inorganic arsenic, iodine, lead, cadmium, mercury, etc) and microbial pathogens do we need it to be in order to be safe in food?
  • What cannot be present? (in terms of pollution, heavy metals, certain chemicals, see above)
  • The nutritional value and chemical composition for the fractions or the purified products from the fractions
  • Techno-functional properties (solubility, ability to form and stabilize emulsions and foams, water and oil absorption capacity,…) (this was not investigated within the ValgOrize project, the Profuture project however takes a closer look at these properties)
  • Bioactive properties (capacity to modulate one or more metabolic processes)
  • Whole cell? Fraction?
  • Dried? Frozen, …

• Minimal amounts required to start commercial activities:

• Pricing info

And the application types we ended up with based on the specifications:

Table 1: Overview of application with special focus on examples explored within ValgOrize

_{* Not considered in ValgOrize, based on literature}