Extraction methods, industrial uses, and nutritional benefits of vegetable byproducts

Vegetables are among the world’s most widely produced horticultural crops and are processed into salads, canned foods, juices, pickles, and powders. Processing vegetables into different value-added products generates a large quantity of byproducts, which can have significant socio-economic and environmental impacts. This review summarizes the role of vegetable byproducts, extraction methods, and applications in the food, pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and related industries. It looks at future research and discovery in vegetable byproduct utilization. Vegetable byproducts provide numerous beneficial bioactive compounds such as polyphenols, antioxidants, carotenoids, vitamins, dietary fibers, enzymes, essential oils, pectin, organic acids, food additives, and minerals. These bioactive compounds can be utilized in different industries, including the food industry for the development of functional foods for various population groups and in the medicine and pharmaceutical industries. Different emerging valorization techniques have been successfully used to extract high-value-added products from vegetable byproducts. However, some methods are limited to the laboratory scale, and scaling up these techniques to the industrial scale still has impediments. Future studies are recommended to scale up the extraction methods and beneficial bioactive compounds to fully exploit these vegetable byproducts for various applications.