Brewer's Spent Grain Valorization for the Food Industry: A Bibliometric Analysis

Brewer’s spent grain (BSG) is the main byproduct from brewing industry. It is frequently underused, although its nutritional value. Recent studies focus on BSG valorization, assessing their bioactive compounds and develop of new products. The objective of this work was analyzing the research made with BSG related with foods, identifying tendencies and associations between the selected articles. The database Scopus was used to realize the simultaneous searching using the keywords: “brewers’ spent grain”, “by-products” and “food”. The filters used were: abstracts and titles, only articles, and temporal delimitation from 2010 to 2023. The papers with context “Biofuel”, “Biorefinery”, “Plant substrate”, “Cellulose” and “Polymer” were excluded, resulting in 57 articles. The software IRaMuTeQ was used to perform the descending hierarchical classification (DHC), correspondence factor analysis (CFA), and textual analysis generating the word clouds and the clusters. Of a total of 2541 occurrences, 1795 were active words. Those repeated three times or more were considered resulting in 644 words and four clusters: 1 (25,9%) with the main words being “product”, “brew” and “industry”; 2 (25,6%) with “acid”, “amino” and “increase”; 3 (26,2%) with “phenolic”, “extract” and “radical”; and 4 (22,2%) with “snack”, “sensory” and “flour”. In the CFA, the X and Y axis represented 41,69% and 31,74% of textual corpus. Each cluster positioned in a different quadrant: 1 in negative axis X and positive Y; 2 in axis positive X and negative Y; 3 in axis positive X and Y and 4 in the axis negative X and Y. The words “BSG”, “product”; “food”, “high” and “protein” were the most frequent in the word cloud, corresponding to 257, 132, 107 and 82 occurrences. The results reveal the most explored subjects in the field of food involving BSG, helping to identify gaps and new potential themes of research.