FOOD BLENDING CASE STUDIES

FOOD BLENDING WHITE PAPERS & ARTICLES

  • Best Practices For Conducting Virtual FAT's In Food Manufacturing

    When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, it became critical that manufacturing plants remain open and operating to provide essential items such as food, beverage, sanitation supplies and more to consumers. New practices were put into place to ensure the safety of all and maintain efficient, effective operations. A critical aspect of keeping up with consumer demand has been the testing and acceptance of new equipment. With consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies reluctant to bring suppliers into their facilities and service technicians limited in their ability to travel due to COVID-19 protocol, the industry has had to get creative to complete the process.

  • Article: The Science Of Mixing Food Powders & Liquids This article explains the technologies and processes involved in product mixing of solids and liquids. By Scott Jones, Marketing Manager, Marion Mixers, Inc.
  • Contamination Control In Food Processing Equipment

    Here, we highlight the issues processors experience in preventing contamination and how engineering for contamination control in food processing equipment can be a solution.

  • Mixing Equipment And Applications In The Food Industry

    We discuss traditional and new specialty mixing technologies for food manufacturing and present sample applications of processing challenges and the corresponding mixing technologies to resolve them.

FOOD BLENDING PRODUCTS

Dispersing powders into liquids and creating a consistent homogeneous product, time after time, is one of the most difficult of all mixing applications. To satisfy this need Silverson has developed the Flashblend, a high shear system for rapid incorporation of a wide range of powders, including problematic gums and thickeners.

Scott Turbon® Bottom Mounted Mixers are designed for difficult mixing applications. They offer all of the high shear features of the Top Mounted Mixers with the added benefit of saving overhead space while increasing operator working room.

The Silverson Ultramix is designed for applications that are beyond the capabilities of a conventional agitator or stirrer but do not necessarily require the intense high shear of a Silverson rotor/stator mixer.

The next step in production efficiency is the Scott Turbon® Dressing and Sauce System. This multi-functional processing environment is designed and built to seamlessly combine batch production and raw material staging.

Cannabis-infused products and medical marijuana are at the forefront of an innovative and promising industry. Fueled by a growing consumer base and increasing investor enthusiasm, the cannabis industry is opening the doors to a new generation of cosmetics, beverages, foods, nutritional supplements, pharmaceuticals, and even pet food & wellness products.

The introduction of powders into a fluid process is one of the most challenging mixing duties you will come across. Incorporating powders directly into a liquid stream, can speed up your process, improve your product quality, while at the same time improve operator safety.

The Scott Turbon® Turbo Dixie Mixer is capable of mixing highly viscous products such as peanut butter as well as loose emulsions that can be finished with the HSM Inline Mixer. The flow characteristics provide medium shear with maximum flow.

Silverson’s sanitary series of high shear Bottom Entry mixers are designed to fit into the bottom or side of a mixing vessel. These high shear mixers are typically used in conjunction with a slow speed anchor stirrer or scraper unit for high viscosity products.

ABOUT FOOD BLENDING

Industrial food blending usually refers to the process of mixing two distinct solids or mixing of bulk solids with small ratios of liquids. Blending and mixing are interchangeable terms. However, blending is generally more gentle than mixing, which is why it’s technically different. The outcome of blending is to take two or more pure elements and combine them into a new product where samples of it will contain the same ratio of the elements that were combined to be blended.   

Examples of products created from mixing solids in food manufacturing include: cake mixes, coffee, tea, beverage powders, ice-cream mixes, yogurts, spices, flours, trail mixes, and cereals.

Examples of or products created from mixing solids with liquids in food manufacturing include: confectionary, pasta, ready-to-eat cereals, pet foods, and dairy products.

Blending equipment is offered in various styles. The style that your food-making operation needs will be based on many different factors, such as, but not limited to: what products are being blended, efficiency, batch size, the facility’s available manufacturing space, preciseness of the blend, energy costs, discharging options, cleaning, and sanitation options.

The most-common styles of blending equipment are:

  • Ribbon Benders — are the most-popular blenders. They use helical ribbons, accommodate larger batch sizes, are very versatile, and cost efficient.
  • Vertical Blenders — are cone shaped and designed for vacuum operations. These blenders are easy to clean, are gentler than horizontal blenders, and have virtually 100 percent discharge.
  • Tumble Blenders — are double-cone shaped and rotate on a horizontal axis. These blenders are generally used for precise blends and thorough blending of powders.
  • Paddle Blenders — These blenders use multiple paddles as agitators and accommodate larger batch sizes. They also have very low shear and generate very minimal heat.

After choosing the style of industrial food blender that will suit your company’s food-processing requirements, it will be equally important to make sure the ribbons, paddles, rods, and shafts are matched to the physical properties of the elements being blended. This is imperative to ensuring better efficiency and reducing maintenance downtime.