Aquafaba: A Multifunctional Ingredient in Food Production

Recently, the demand of consumers for plant-based foods to replace mainly meat, egg, and dairy products by mimicking their structure with alternatives in many food applications has grown significantly. This tendency has been driven by many reasons mainly comprised of allergenicity and different dietary preferences of consumers, and sustainability issues. In this regard, aquafaba has a great potential to meet these requests and needs due to not only its nutritional properties but also multi-functionalities such as foaming, emulsifying, gelling, and/or thickening, the ability/capacity of water-, and oil absorption/holding, which allow to use in a wide range of food products. In this regard, aquafaba takes a place in general egg and/or fat replacer, and alternative to emulsifier and gelling agents mainly in baked goods, desserts/confectionery food products, and mayonnaise. Moreover, it gives an opportunity to reduce environmental load, by recycling by-products into value-added food ingredients. Therefore, it is a promising clean-label and eco-friendly ingredient for sustainable food production and a circular economy. However, there are restrictions on the quality standardization of aquafaba and applied food products for industrialization and commercialization, because of several factors affecting the composition of aquafaba. In addition, although some researchers focused on drying aquafaba regarding low aw value and thus increase the shelf life, more studies are needed for the optimization of different drying methods and process parameters for industrialization, as well. Moreover, although the amount and activity of the anti-nutritional compound of aquafaba are generally lower than raw seeds, more studies should affirm this issue. Future studies should also head for the application of aquafaba to more food products and its effects on the quality of end products, even regarding gluten-free and non-dairy food products.