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Incorporation of recovered food and food scraps into poultry feed: A systematic review
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This systematic review found that heat-treated post-consumer food scraps can be safely incorporated into poultry feed, helping reduce food waste while meeting nutritional requirements. The research shows that proper sterilization addresses biological and chemical safety concerns, though microplastic contamination from food packaging in recovered food streams remains an emerging consideration for animal feed safety.
Abstract Food wastage represents the loss of both economic and resource investments. Incorporation of recovered food and food scraps, defined as the potentially edible organic matter left over from the preparation, sale, and consumption of food, into animal feed is a potential strategy to reduce food wastage and recover some of the embedded resources within the residual food material. There is a need to align recovered food and food scraps’ nutritional quality, chemical and biological safety with scalable and feasible processing requirements that dovetail with the nutritional requirements of food animals. This review examines the feasibility of incorporating treated post-consumer food scraps into poultry feed, which currently represent the most consumed animal protein on the planet. The review summarizes the broad nutritional composition of post-consumer food scraps, toxicological considerations associated with incorporating food scraps into poultry feed, food scrap pre-treatments related to feed applications and feeding studies that incorporated post-consumer food scraps into animal feed rations. Research appears to indicate that sterilization through heat treatment is sufficient to control pathogenic microorganism contamination in recovered food. Other contaminants such as mycotoxins, heavy metals, microplastics, biogenic amines, antinutritional factors cannot always be removed from recovered food and subsequently, infrastructure to survey levels of contamination in recovered food to be used in concert with developing technologies to better remove these contaminants is recommended. Subsequently, the review illustrates that pre-treatments in concert with surveillance of incoming recovered food and food scraps may be used to ensure the safety of incorporating such material into poultry feed. Studies show large variability in the nutritional composition of consumer food scraps, but on average, lipid and fiber levels are higher in recovered food scraps compared to maize and soybean meal, while protein levels are higher than in maize and lower than in soybean meal. Feeding studies suggest an incorporation level of up to approximately 20% is associated with positive or neutral impacts on growth performance indicators
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