The vegetable industry is a large consumer of drinking water. This paper investigates the possibilities of Reverse Osmosis (RO) or tight Nanofiltration (NF) for the treatment of cauliflower blanching wastewater with a view to recycling within the production unit. Ultrafiltration at 100 000 g mol−1 molecular weight cut-off was necessary to decrease turbidity below 1 NTU as required before NF or RO. Three NF (DK, NF270 and SRD3) and one RO (ESPA4) membranes were tested at bench-scale in a crossflow filtration mode. Only RO allowed to reach the desired quality for a reuse purpose, with an acceptable residual COD content of 225 mg O2 L−1. The Solution-Diffusion model was validated for the transfer of glucose and fructose, for NF270, DK and ESPA4 membranes and their permeability coefficients calculated.