Phytochemical fortification in fruit and vegetable beverages with green technologies

© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.Background: Phytochemical, bioactive and nutraceutical compounds are terms usually found in the scientific literature related to natural compounds found in plants linked to health-promoting properties. Fruit and vegetable beverages (mainly juice and smoothies) are a convenient strategy to enhance the consumption of horticultural commodities, with the possibility of being fortified with plant byproducts to enhance the content of bioactive compounds. Objective: This review aims to analyse the different green technologies applied in beverage processing with a fortification effect on their health promoting compounds. Results: Fortification can be performed by several strategies, including physical elicitors (e.g., processing technologies), plant/algae extract supplementation, and fermentation with probiotics, among others. Thermal processing technologies are conventionally used to ensure the preservation of food safety with a long shelf life, but this frequently reduces nutritional and sensory quality. However, green non-thermal technologies (e.g., UV, high-pressure processing, pulsed electric fields, ultrasounds, cold plasma, etc.) are being widely investigated in order to reduce costs and make possible more sustainable production processes with-out affecting the nutritional and sensory quality of beverages. Conclusions: Such green processing technologies may enhance the content of phytochemical compounds through improvement of their extraction/bioaccessibility and/or different biosynthetic reactions that occurred during processing.