Functional properties of mild fractionated soy protein as related to the processing pH

With rapid population growth, sustainable food production is highly required worldwide. Partially replacing animal proteins with plant proteins is a promising approach. Traditional fractionation processes of plant-based materials target to high purity of components, such as protein isolates. However, such fractionation processes consumes large amount of water and organic solvent reducing the sustainability of plant protein production.
In this study, soybean was selected as raw material because of its popularity in the market. We focused on an alternative mild fractionation, which is based on aqueous fractionation process with some modifications, such as the omission of oil extraction and several washing steps. We believe that mild fractionation can be a potential solution for further increasing the sustainability of plant-based products and by modifying fractionation parameters such as the pH we can achieve protein rich fractions of different functionalities.