The growing demand for more sustainable, healthier, and environmentally friendly food ingredients is driving the development of solutions focused on the valorization of agro-industrial residues. However, conventional methods used for the recovery of bioactive components from plant-based by-products, such as potato peel, present significant limitations, including the use of organic solvents, excessive heat application, high energy consumption, generation of secondary waste, and low efficiency in the selective separation of structural and functional compounds (Vescovo et al., 2025). Additionally, many of these processes require harsh chemical steps that are incompatible with industrial-scale production aimed at clean label ingredient development, thereby hindering their integration into circular and sustainable production chains.

Although potato peel is a rich source of phenolic compounds, starch, and dietary fibers, it remains largely discarded or underutilized, representing a loss of economic and nutritional value (Ijaz et al., 2024). Conventional methods fail to achieve efficient fractionation with minimal degradation, often resulting in mixed products with low functionality and cross-contamination. Moreover, there is a lack of technically feasible, cost-effective, and environmentally clean processes capable of generating multiple functional ingredients from a single plant-based raw material.

The recovery of phenolic compounds from plant residues typically involves extraction with heated organic solvents, such as ethanol, methanol, or acetone. While these extraction processes can achieve high yields, they employ toxic or flammable solvents, increase the risk of solvent residues in the final extract that may compromise safety and quality, lead to losses of heat-sensitive compounds, require high energy input, and generate contaminating effluents, ultimately reducing process sustainability (Martins Strieder et al., 2025).

Conventional starch extraction techniques, in turn, involve steps such as soaking, wet milling, sequential washing, and the use of sodium metabisulfite as a reducing agent to prevent oxidation. However, the presence of this chemical additive restricts its use in formulations intended for sulfite-sensitive consumers and conflicts with clean label principles. Furthermore, conventional starch isolation methods are designed to completely purify the starch, removing residual proteins that could provide functional benefits in more complex food formulations (Dorantes-Fuertes, López-Méndez, Martínez-Castellanos, Meléndez-Armenta, & Jiménez-Martínez, 2024; Neeraj Siddiqui, Dalal, Srivastva, & Pathera, 2021).

The recovery of dietary fibers often requires prolonged thermal treatments and the use of strong alkalis or acids, which compromise fiber integrity and generate environmentally harmful residues. Overall, these approaches focus on isolating a single ingredient, disregarding the potential for selective co-extraction of multiple functional fractions (Chaosuan, Phimolsiripol, & Gavahian, 2024; Scarcella, Lopes, Silva, & Andrade, 2024; Waliullah, Mu, & Ma, 2021).

Among emerging non-thermal technologies, pulsed electric field (PEF) has shown potential to enhance the extraction of phenolic compounds and modify starch structures (Frontuto et al., 2019; Li et al., 2019; Milanezzi & Silva, 2025). However, most existing studies have explored PEF either to enhance phenolic compound extraction or to modify starch functionality, treating these applications as separate processes. In contrast, the present study integrates these objectives by applying PEF pretreatment directly to potato peel by-products (PPB), enabling the simultaneous recovery of phenolics and starch through a single fractionation step. Moreover, this approach takes advantage of PEF's ability to induce structural modifications in starch within the matrix during pretreatment, prior to its isolation (Bernabeu, Salgado-Ramos, Barba, Collado, & Castagnini, 2024).

In this context, this study presents an innovative, non-thermal, sustainable, and environmentally friendly process for the fractionation of potato peel by-products. The approach involves the application of a PEF pretreatment followed by sequential batch extractions using only water at pH 7.0 as the solvent. This process enables the separation of the flour into three distinct fractions with technological and functional properties: (i) an aqueous extract rich in phenolic compounds and soluble proteins; (ii) a starch-based fraction containing proteins; and (iii) a solid fraction concentrated in dietary fibers and proteins. Therefore, this is a one-step, additive-free, and clean-label strategy capable of converting an agro-industrial by-product into three multifunctional ingredients with high added value and potential application in innovative and sustainable food systems. Accordingly, the objective of this study was to evaluate how the electric field intensity of the PEF pretreatment (0, 1, 3, and 5 kV/cm) affects the efficiency of the fractionation process and the technological and functional characteristics of the recovered fractions.