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Review
. 2021 May 12;10(5):1067.
doi: 10.3390/foods10051067.

Dairy By-Products: A Review on the Valorization of Whey and Second Cheese Whey

Arona Figueroa Pires  1 , Natalí Garcia Marnotes  1   2 , Olga Díaz Rubio  2 , Angel Cobos Garcia  2 , Carlos Dias Pereira  1   3
Affiliations
Review

Dairy By-Products: A Review on the Valorization of Whey and Second Cheese Whey

Arona Figueroa Pires et al. Foods. .

Abstract

The search for new food products that promote consumers health has always been of great interest. The dairy industry is perhaps the best example regarding the emergence of new products with claimed health benefits. Cheese whey (CW), the by-product resulting from cheese production, and second cheese whey (SCW), which is the by-product of whey cheese manufacture, have proven to contain potential ingredients for the development of food products with improved nutritional characteristics and other functionalities. Nowadays, due to their nutritional quality, whey products have gained a prominent position among healthy food products. However, for a long time, CW and SCW were usually treated as waste or as animal feed. Due to their high organic content, these by-products can cause serious environmental problems if discarded without appropriate treatment. Small and medium size dairy companies do not have the equipment and structure to process whey and second cheese whey. In these cases, generally, they are used for animal feed or discarded without an appropriate treatment, being the cause of several constraints. There are several studies regarding CW valorization and there is a wide range of whey products in the market. However, in the case of SCW, there remains a lack of studies regarding its nutritional and functional properties, as well as ways to reuse this by-product in order to create economic value and reduce environmental impacts associated to its disposal.

Keywords: cheese whey; second whey cheese; ultrafiltration; valorization.

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Conflict of interest statement

Authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Scheme of whey cheese (Requeijão) manufacturing and second cheese whey (Sorelho) production.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Representative scheme for obtaining whey protein concentrates (WPC) and whey protein isolate (WPI).
Figure 3
Figure 3
Example of UF/DF applied to SCW for the obtaining of fermented SCW drinks.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Membrane separation processes used to process CW and SCW.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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