Sustainable valorization of amla pomace: Optimization of sweetmeat using fuzzy logic approach and its quality characterization

Abstract

Food waste constitutes nearly half the global waste and is expected to rise due to population growth and changing consumer pattern. Fruit pomace, a prominent by-product of juice production, offers potential nutritional and phytochemical properties that promote improved therapeutic, functional and sensory qualities of food products when incorporated, while supporting sustainable bio-economic practices. Amla pomace, rich in vitamin C and bioactive compounds, has high potential for developing functional foods. Further, utilization of amla pomace in sweetmeat is found to have better nutritional and functional properties compared to traditional khoa based sweetmeat. This study is focused on development of amla pomace sweetmeat emphasizing on the use of fuzzy logic approach for optimization of sensory data, considering colour & appearance (CA), body & texture (BT), flavour (F) and overall acceptability (OA) as the sensory quality parameters. The best sweetmeat sample, which performed better than the control samples, included 30% khoa, 22.5% amla pomace, 7.5% desiccated coconut, and 40% sugar. Additionally, the key characteristics that define sweetmeat quality were ranked as follows: OA > BT > F > CA. Further, the nutritional, phytochemical and textural characteristics of control and optimized amla pomace sweetmeat sample were assessed. The amla pomace sweetmeat had significantly higher amount of fibre content (3.97%), ascorbic acid (98.71 mg/100 ml) and phenolic compounds (54.65 mg GAE/g), while high levels of fat and protein was observed otherwise. Additionally, inclusion of amla pomace enhanced the textural properties of the sweetmeat. Furthermore, the polysaccharide isolated from amla pomace sweetmeat were analysed for monosaccharide composition using GC-MS and the resulted illustrated presence of various monosaccharides including, galactose, galacturonic acid, arabinose, rhamnose, glucose, xylose and mannose.