On 27th August 2021, Dr. Haibo Huang, an associate professor in the Department of Food Science and Technology and affiliated with the Department of Biological Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech, gave an academic report entitled “Processing of Agricultural and Food Waste into High-value Products.”
Dr. Huang’s research focuses on developing food and bioprocessing technologies to produce food ingredients and green chemicals from agricultural and food products for improving the sustainability of the food supply chain.
Nearly 30% of food is being wasted globally, resulting in billions of dollars of economic losses, including the food itself and associated water, energy, and chemicals spent in the food supply chain. In this presentation, Dr. Huang stated the current situation of food waste around the world. He talked about how processing technologies were applied to convert food wastes into high-value food ingredients and functional energy storage materials, with the purpose of reducing food waste, recover resources, and promote sustainability. The market price of protein increases exponentially with the protein concentration in the product. Dr. Huang set the brewer’s grains as examples to help students better understand the processing methods, illustrating that brewer’s grains could be divided into high-protein products and high-fiber products to achieve comprehensive utilization.
In addition to scientific research, Dr. Huang also narrated his journal in the last eighteen years about study experience. He encouraged students to have a good command of basic knowledge and stay open-minded to speed up discipline integration.