The Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research awarded a $540,000 Seeding Solutions Grant to Cornell University to develop a way to convert nutritious agricultural waste into snack foods.
The grant has been matched by the New York Apple Association and Cornell University for a total $1.08 million investment, according to a news release.
“About one-third of food waste occurs during food processing operations and represents tremendous amounts of nutrition and energy,” Syed Rizvi, professor of food process engineering at Cornell University and the principal investigator of the project, said in the release. “Value recovery from these resources to health beneficial products using novel technologies is both a necessity and a challenge that we propose to address in this research.”
The research aims to use fruit skin, seeds, core, stems and soft tissue left behind after processing for juice to create a type of nutritious snack food.
