The low fruit and vegetable consumption identified by the World Health Organization is a significant factor for adverse health consequences, like obesity and noncommunicable diseases. In the worldwide effort of boosting fruit and vegetable consumption to at least five servings of fruits and vegetables per day (5-A-Day), healthy, mildly sweet and salty dried crunchy vegetable snacks can add up increasing attractiveness of vegetables among youngsters. The objectives of this research were to obtain sweet and salty dried parsnip snacks, pretreated with concentrated whey (CW) and concentrated hydrolyzed whey (HW), to study the influence of osmotic pressure and temperature (45, 55 and 65 °C) on the convective drying process and to estimate the kinetic parameters (diffusion coefficients, activation energy) of parsnip drying. Nonlinear regression models were applied to estimate the drying parameters based on Henderson - Pabis equations. Results have shown that the activation energy required during drying by the chips treated with HW (23.89 kJ·mol-1) and CW (20.06 kJ·mol-1) is lower than in the reference sample (31.02 kJ·mol-1). Moreover, these represents a smart valorization of a by product from dairy industry rich in valuable minerals, proteins and sugars in the veggie industry.
