There is large variety of industries that need eggs to elaborate their products. In the human food sector, the egg contributes, besides its high nutritive value, a wide range of functional capacities needed for the elaboration processing of many foods. On the other hand, the increasing demand of pre-cooked food dishes implies a higher use of eggs, either traditional dishes (peeled hard boiled eggs, omelettes) or sophisticated dishes (ethnics dishes).

Eggs are also important for some non-food industries because of their technologic features, above all those of the white. Nevertheless, non-food uses are only 5% of the whole egg market. The manufacture of feed for pets and aquacultures, currently in expansion, can also use eggs as a raw material with a high nutritional value.

There are many different possibilities for the use of egg products (see table), and they will be many more in the future. These are some general features of egg products: fluid, frozen and dried. The last one is less appropriated for the elaboration of desserts, ice creams, drinks or babies’ food. The dried white is not useful to make ice creams.

The shell egg also has the features of the yolk and it has also certain skimming capacity but in a lower level. It is commonly used in the elaboration of mayonnaises, sauces, crème caramels, fairy cakes, wafers, pasta, special bread, etc. It is interesting to know functional capacities of the yolk and the albumen and their possible uses (see table).

Now it is possible to split and purify certain compounds of the albumen such as the ovoalbumin (55% of the white protein) that is very demanded in the food industry as emulsion and skimming agent.

The lysozyme (30g/kg albumen) is also an emulsion and skimming agent and it is used as a natural preservative in some food because of its antibiotic activity (clostridium, Yersinia, Campylobacter, and some bacillus); It is also useful in the wine industry and in the elaboration of medicines.

The avidin also has pharmaceutical uses. It is one of the tools of the diagnostic kits. The avidin production in Europe is still in an incipient stage. Other proteins of the white –more than 30- have important uses that will be developed while splitting and purifying techniques are improved and cheaper.

The complex interrelation among the yolk compounds make difficult to extract them individually. However, new steps forward are going to be taken. The fist step was the extraction of the lecithin that has a great emulsion capacity.

In a near future, many egg substances will be extracted from eggs. The capacities of these substances will be more powerful than the whole yolk or the whole white.