<p>Every year, across the globe, the food industry generates a substantial amount of waste and by-products from numerous sources and these wastages showed umpteen opportunities to be treated as concealed treasure for precious bioactive entities. Being rich in functional moieties (such as dietary fibres, natural colorants, proteins etc.) these so-called food waste would like to offer innovative opportunities for creating high-value yields by utilizing sophisticated techniques which would find potential application in numerous fields. By incorporating these by-products and so-called food wastage into mainstream, the concepts of the regenerative economy would be highly encouraged, which would unlock hidden benefits as well as mitigate its negative effects on the environment. In this review article, an attempt has been taken to summarize and explore the nutritional impact and plausible applications of food waste valorisation based on previous academic investigations published in scholarly scientific journals and these distilled key findings would like to offer the researchers as an informative source of food waste utilization for sustainable economy thus reducing the burden of browsing multiple articles in a time saving way. This review article also highlighted food waste minimizing strategy along with real ground obstacles associated with food waste management and provide a strategic framework to policy makers, industry head as well as researchers for harnessing novel practices related to food wastage to extract maximal benefit from it.</p> Graphical abstract <p></p>