The PHENOLEO project or how to separate and add-value to phenolic compounds present in rapeseed and sunflower meals☆

Rapeseed and sunflower meal are mainly used as animal feed but they can also be considered as a potential source of bioactive phenolic compounds. However, the desolventization/toasting processes that are needed to produce these meals might influence concentration and chemical structure of phenolic compounds, and change their bioactive properties. Moreover, the recovery processes of these molecules from meals are based on the use of solvent that generates effluents and might affect the integrity of the other constituents of the meals. Knowing this, the PHENOLEO project, funded by the SAS PIVERT, was a research program based on the biorefinery of rapeseed and sunflower meals that aimed to develop new routes of valorization of these materials mostly by the separation and valorization of their simple phenolic compounds. Thus, we decided to focus this study on the impact of the desolventization process on the biochemical composition of meals, the separation process of their simple phenolic compounds, the production of phenolic acids from meals and the potential valorization routes of the phenolic fraction.