Milk and dairy products have long played a central role in human nutrition due to their rich content of essential nutrients and bioactive compounds. The growing interest in functional foods—offering health benefits beyond basic nutrition—has made dairy products an ideal base for functionalization. Increasing consumer demand for healthy, sustainable, and clean-label foods is driving innovation through the use of alternative ingredients such as food industry by-products, next-generation probiotics and postbiotics, unconventional fibers, microalgae, and bioactive compounds from microbial fermentation. As current literature reviews mainly address individual ingredient categories, this review provides a comprehensive overview of innovative and alternative ingredients for dairy functionalization, emphasizing their nutritional and health-promoting potential. Key topics include probiotics and postbiotics, alternative fibers, agri-food waste, bioactive peptides, bacteriocins, and microalgae, with applications in developing ice cream and fresh cheeses from buffalo milk. Finally, it identifies current research gaps and future directions to optimize functional dairy development while enhancing production efficiency and sustainability. • Next-generation probiotics show potential to enhance functional dairy products. • Microalgae enhance the antioxidant and bioactive profile of dairy products. • Food waste prebiotic fibers boost rheology and probiotic survival in dairy systems. • Bioactive Peptides show ACE-inhibitory, antioxidant, and immunomodulatory capacity. • LAB-derived bacteriocins give effective natural bio-preservation in dairy products.
Calabrese et al. (Wed,) studied this question.