Protein separation processes in food and bioproduct manufacturing

3 PROTEIN SEPARATION PROCESSES IN FOOD AND BIOPRODUCT MANUFACTURING 

Proteins can be processed to obtain enriched flours, concentrates or isolates for various food and bioproduct applications. In this chapter, the term bioproduct is used to indicate functional foods, nutraceutical products, cosmetic products and other industrial (non-food) products. 

Air classification is a milling technique that allows the fractionation of plant grains/seeds into high starch and high protein flours. The milling process yields flours having particles of two discrete sizes and densities. Air classification exploits this phenomenon to separate the light fine fraction (protein) from the heavy coarse fraction (starch). 

Amongst others, high protein flours (up to 75% purity in some cases) have been successfully produced from wheat, soybean, beans, lentils, chickpeas and peas using air classification (Wu and Strongfellow, 1979,1981 Tyler and Panchuk, 1982 Wolf et al., 2002). 

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