Valorization of orange peels exploiting fungal solid-state and lacto-fermentation.

To the best of our knowledge this is the first study exploiting orange peels as low-cost raw material for the production of lactic acid avoiding the employment of commercial enzymes. The enzymes necessary for the hydrolyses were directly produced during A. awamori fermentation and the reducing sugars obtained were fermented for lactic acid production. Despite this preliminary work carried out to study the feasibility of this approach, the concentrations of reducing sugars and lactic acid produced were encouraging, leaving open the possibility of other studies for the optimization of the strategy proposed here. © 2023 The Authors. Journal of The Science of Food and Agriculture published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society of Chemical Industry.