Spectroscopy, Rheology and Extrusion Food Development and Testing Applications

During the development process, you are concerned with optimizing your recipe, understanding the complexity of your food formulation and its ingredients, creating an effective process, and assessing the characteristics of your products to ensure that they meet your expectations. You need to verify your input ingredients, intermediate products that arise during the process, and tweak process parameters to create a final food product that is simply delicious. Key instruments in the food development and commercialization processes can include extruders and rheometers. Food extruders mix the raw ingredients, apply heat and pressure as needed, and shape the products into final form. Food rheometers assess viscoelastic properties throughout the process to control sensory properties and predict stability and shelf life. Used together, these instruments make great partners for you and any of your food development processes.

Food extrusion is a flexible food development and processing technique to manage mechanical and sensory attributes of structurally complex food products and food analogs. It is an established, highly versatile technique to produce food, animal feed, nutritional additives, flavors, and more. Starting materials for food extrusion processes are primarily starch- or protein-based materials, but also include other components to add structure (dark flours, wheat bran or broken rice). Extruders ensure high-quality, consistent product quality with precise control from start to finish for laboratory-scale food development and commercialization. It enables continuous, cost-effective production of pasta, cereal, snack, meat substitute, and animal feed products by emulsification and mixing steps to mix various solid, liquid, and gel ingredients into a single product.

Plant-based ingredients can be formulated to mimic the texture, taste, appearance, and nutritional value of animal meats. These imitation meat products are rising in popularity at grocery stores for home use and in restaurants everywhere. Twin-screw extrusion enables consistent production of meat analogs to mimic beef, chicken, and seafood.

Quality control for foods and beverages includes a range of food quality attributes, measurements, and analysis to assess sensory attributes, nutritional components, and chemical composition of the food product and its ingredients as well as contaminants that might be present.

Premium quality, delicious, healthy drinks make every beverage producer proud. Discover how to analyze alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages as an increasing emphasis is put on quality control to secure safe drinks supplies. Determine alcohol content and additives in beer and wine or the ingredients and compositions of milk, bottled water, and other drinks, as well as many other analyses.

Ensure that the sensory attributes of your food products provide the ideal texture, appearance, and consistency to meet the promises of your brand. You create, process, and monitor food products that need to appeal to a diverse range of sensory expectations. Your customers are sensitive to subtle differences in sight, touch, feel, taste, and smell. See how Thermo Scientific instruments and resources can help you provide the ideal texture, appearance, and consistency your brand needs.

The confectionery industry, focused on products concocted from sugar or sugar substitutes, is a diverse one. It includes chocolates, candy bars, jellies, gums, hard and chewy candies, and other sweets. How they flow, how their ingredients interact, how they respond to deformation, temperature changes, and setting on a shelf before consumption affect your ability to consistently produce tasty products with a pleasing mouthfeel.

Proximate analysis quantifies the chemical composition of the food item in terms of moisture, protein, fat, fiber, and ash content. To meet regulatory requirements and food safety measures, you need to quantify your product's main or “proximate” components in terms of moisture, protein, fat, fiber, and ash content. Examine how our instruments make this step easy and accurate.

Analysis of nutritional components expands beyond proximate analysis to also include the nutritional components in foods (vitamins, minerals, protein, fat, fiber, sodium, sugar, carbohydrates, energy values, etc.). You and your savvy consumers rely on accurate analysis to provide carbohydrate, fat, fiber, protein, vitamin, and other nutrients. Analyze and describe the components inside with confidence.

The nutrients provided in basic dairy products can be rich in fat, protein, sugar, and essential micronutrients (amino acids, calcium, B and D vitamins, phosphorus, and potassium) and provide health benefits for bone building, lowering blood pressure, and more. Aside from milk beverages, dairy products come in powder (milk powders, milk protein powders, infant formulas), semi-solid (cream cheese, yogurt, fermented milk, ice cream, puddings/custards), and solid forms (cheese and butter). Dairy manufacturing processes, complicated by thermal cycles and mechanical manipulations to manage fat and moisture content and provide the right product consistency, require stringent monitoring of the viscosity changes. Since many of the products in the milk powders/whey protein concentrate category target infant feeding, the stakes are high to maintain the proper nutritional composition.

Whether you’re manufacturing food ingredients, flavorings, colorants, fragrances, or the final product, you need to be cognizant of everything that’s inside. You need methods to help verify that each of these contains high-purity ingredients and that your workflow employs the tools necessary for the accurate identification and timely management of any contaminant issues that may arise.