The Development of Smart Veggie Snack from Ugly Vegetables

Abstract

Vegetables are crucial for human health yet the daily consumption is often insufficient to reap their full benefits. 60% of vegetables are discarded due to visual defects which are considered as ugly vegetables. To combat the environmental concern regarding vegetable waste, a vegetable snack bar was developed. Due to its convenience, nutrition rich snack bars such as cereal bars, nutty snack bars and dry fruit snack bars are developed to aid in the daily nutritional requirements. To accommodate this, linear programming was used to provide a formulation according to the desired nutritional benefits of the snack bar which was high in protein and fiber. There are two phases in developing a snack bar, the solid phase and the binding phase. For the binding phase, this study analyzed glucose syrup, maltodextrin, and gelatin as binding agents. From the texture analysis glucose showed the highest score for crispiness (3188.64 ± 1.14 g.force) whereas gelatin showed the lowest score (1988.29 ± 0.83 g .force). In terms of sensory evaluation, the results showed that glucose was the most accepted binding agent for a crispy snack bar (8.13 ± 0.68). The development of vegetable snack bar with three different variations (cereal, nuts and dry fruits) was continued with glucose syrup as the binding agent. According to the nutritional analysis of protein and fiber, it showed that both the protein and fiber content align with the solutions provided by the linear programming (exceeding 10 grams of protein and 5 grams of fiber per 100 grams of product). Sensory evaluation was also done to know the overall acceptability of each variant of snack bars, the cereal and vegetables variant shown to have the highest liking score (5.71 ± 1.68) and the lowest was found to be the dried fruit and vegetables variant (5.14 ± 1.99). In conclusion, glucose was found to be the best suited binding agent for a crispy snack bar and the cereal and vegetable bar variant was shown to have a high protein and fiber content and was the most liked product.