The food processing industry is one of the largest consumers of energy and water in the manufacturing sector. It is vital that conservation measures are taken to reduce the use of electricity, fuel, and water for producers to have long-term, sustainable growth. The Pacific Northwest (PNW) region includes some the largest food processers in the United States, particularly with products such as fruit and vegetable preserves, apples products, potato products, and milk. Energy and water consumption in PNW food processing facilities are quantified as well as techniques to increase efficiency and reduce waste. Mechanical drive systems and refrigeration consumes the most electricity in the industry and the implementation of energy management plans has the largest potential to save electricity in PNW facilities. Heating and cooling process needs are the largest consumers of energy in the food processing industry. Implementing cogeneration/trigeneration technology, replacing of older equipment, capturing waste heat, and reusing wastewater can have significant impacts on both energy and water consumption. Novel, emerging technologies such as membrane separation, high-pressure processing, microwave assist, ultrasound, pulsed high electric fields, ozone, and hydrogen/electricity generation have significant potential to benefit the food processing industry by increasing efficiency and allowing companies to stay competitive in an industry where sustainable practices are becoming increasingly important to the public.

In recent years, several global issues related to food waste, increasing CO2 emissions, water pollution, over-fertilization, deforestation, loss of arable land, food security, and energy storage have emerged. Climate change urgently needs to be addressed from an ecological and social perspective. Implementing new indoor urban vertical farming (IUVF) operations is one way to combat the above-mentioned issues as well as foodborne illnesses, scarcity of drinking water, and more crop failure due to infection from plant pathogens and insect pests. A promising production mode is plant factories (PFs), which are indoor plant production systems completely isolated from outside environment. This paper mainly focuses on the comprehensive review of scientific papers in order to analyse the different applications of urban farming (UF) based on three different dimensions: a) the manufacturing techniques and equipment used; b) the energy that these systems require, the distribution of energy, and ways to minimize the energy-related cost; and c) the technological innovations applied in order to optimize the cultivation possibilities of IUVF.

Understanding environmental impacts of complete food supply chains is important for the food industry to help devise strategies for reducing the impacts of current and future products. Breakfast cereals are one of the most important foods consumed in many countries, but their environmental impacts are currently unknown. Therefore, this study explores the environmental sustainability issues in the food–energy–water nexus by considering breakfast cereals manufactured by one of the world’s largest producers, Kellogg Europe. A life cycle assessment has been carried out for these purposes with the aim of helping the Company to integrate environmental sustainability considerations into the design of their products and packaging. The results indicate that the average global warming potential (GWP) of Kellogg’s breakfast cereals is 2.64 kg CO2 eq. per kg of product. The main GWP hotspots are the ingredients (48%) and energy used in the manufacturing process (23%); packaging and transport contribute 15% each. Rice is the single largest contributor to the GWP of the ingredients (38%). The manufacturing stage is the main contributor of primary energy demand (34%), while the ingredients are responsible for more than 90% of the water footprint. The ingredients are also the main contributors to most other environmental impacts, including land use (97%), depletion of elements (61%), eutrophication (71%), human toxicity (54%) and photochemical smog (50%). The impacts from packaging are high for freshwater and marine toxicity. The contribution of transport is significant for depletion of elements and fossil resources (23%), acidification (32%), ozone depletion (28%) and photochemical smog (24%). Improvement opportunities explored in the paper include better agricultural practices, recipe modifications, improved energy efficiency of manufacturing processes and use of alternative packaging. Impacts from consumption are also discussed.

With the increasing urbanization but growing resource scarcities, the securing provision of fundamental resources as food, energy and water (FEW) has become a unique challenge for urban sustainability. This is not only because of continuous demand of resource imports from different regions for urban areas, but also due to the complex interrelationships among FEW systems. In such context, exploring the interactions between FEW resources and economic activities when investigating FEW provisions to meet urban demand through trade is very essential to find effective policy intervention points and priority areas for actions. This paper investigates external binding FEW resource flows with internal certain interlinkages driven by final demand of Beijing city at different nodes along their supply chains, by combing structural path analysis and multi-regional input-output model of China 2010. The results show that the key source regions present overall neighborhood pattern that Hebei, Inner Mongolia, Anhui, Jiangsu, and Shandong near Beijing are the five leading contributors of tran-regional FEW provisions. The top 20 nexus paths are identified and the most important nexus pathways start with the other services in Beijing. Besides this, the critical supply chains appear divergent directions for FEW flows, driven by food, construction and agriculture industries respectively. Moreover, the key nodes mainly concentrate on less developed regions and energy-related sectors. For example, non-metal products manufacturing in Hebei, petroleum refining and coking in Heilongjiang, and coal mining and washing in Inner Mongolia have larger impacts on all of FEW flows across the supply chains. These results are very informative to targeting our efforts to address the urban FEW nexus issue both from the perspective of supply side and demand side.

Recent advances in detailed multiregional input-output databases offers new opportunities to use these environmental accounting tools to explore the interrelationships between energy, water and food–the energy-water-food nexus. This paper takes the UK asa case study and calculates energy, water and food consumption-based accounts for 1997–2013. Policies, designed to reduce the environmental impact of consumption of products, can intervene at many stages in a product’s whole life-time from ‘cradle to gate’. We use input-output analysis techniques to investigate the interaction between the energy, water and food impacts of products at different points along their supply chains, from the extraction of material and burning of energy, to the point of final consumption. We identify the twenty most important final products whose large energy, water and food impacts could be captured by various demand-side strategies such as reducing food waste or dietary changes. We then use structural-path analysis to calculate the twenty most important supply chains whose impact could be captured by resource efficiency policies which act at the point of extraction and during the manufacturing process. Finally, we recognise that strategies that aim to reduce environmental impacts should not harm the socioeconomic well-being of the UK and her trade partners and suggest that pathways should be targeted where the employment and value added dependencies are relatively low.

Recently, reports have been published on the occurrence of chlorate mainly in fruits and vegetables. Chlorate is a by-product of chlorinating agents used to disinfect water, and can be expected to be found in varying concentrations in drinking water. Data on potable water taken at 39 sampling points across Europe showed chlorate to range from < 0.003 to 0.803 mg l –¹ with a mean of 0.145 mg l –¹. Chlorate, however, can also be used as a pesticide, but authorisation was withdrawn in the European Union (EU), resulting in a default maximum residue limit (MRL) for foods of 0.01 mg kg –¹. This default MRL has now led to significant problems in the EU, where routinely disinfected water, used in the preparation of food products such as vegetables or fruits, leaves chlorate residues in excess of the default MRL, and in strict legal terms renders the food unmarketable. Due to the paucity of data on the chlorate content of prepared foods in general, we collated chlorate data on more than 3400 samples of mainly prepared foods, including dairy products, meats, fruits, vegetables and different food ingredients/additives. In total, 50.5% of the food samples contained chlorate above 0.01 mg kg –¹, albeit not due to the use of chlorate as a pesticide but mainly due to the occurrence of chlorate as an unavoidable disinfectant by-product. A further entry point of chlorate into foods may be via additives/ingredients that may contain chlorate as a by-product of the manufacturing process (e.g. electrolysis). Of the positive samples in this study, 22.4% revealed chlorate above 0.1 mg kg –¹. In the absence of EU levels for chlorate in water, any future EU regulations must consider the already available WHO guideline value of 0.7 mg l –¹ in potable water, and the continued importance of the usage of oxyhalides for disinfection purposes.

This review article demonstrates fundamentals regarding the manufacturing of multilayer oil-in-water (M-O/W) emulsions and factors affecting stability of these systems. Moreover, characteristics of major bioactive lipophilic components and ingredients mostly applied to form multilayered membranes as well analytical methods used to examine properties of M-O/W emulsions are specified. It has been shown that production of M-O/W systems is based on the layer-by-layer (LbL) electrostatic deposition technique which makes use of the electrostatic attraction of oppositely charged surfactants and biopolymers to form multicomposite protective layers around emulsion droplets. Finally, limitations regarding studies of M-O/W systems which should be developed are specified.