Manufacturing Better Quality Food Powders from Spray Drying and Subsequent Treatments

Abstract

In this article three major aspects of spray-dried food powders are discussed. We first address several practical problems involved during spray drying that may greatly influence product quality. The second issue identifies how an accurate drying kinetics model can form a useful tool to predict changes in the physical and biological quality aspects and the microstructure of the particle during processing. Dryer-wide simulations using the accurate drying kinetics model can significantly reduce the number of experimental trials for optimizing the process. To date, such success has been restricted to production runs for pilot-scale or small-scale industrial operations. The final issue addresses some of the challenges encountered when evaluating the functionality of the spray-dried powders during their reconstitution. The superior functionality of the spray-dried food product needs to be established more scientifically, which can help commercial operations to achieve high-quality reconstitution.

Keywords:

• Drying kinetics
• Fluidized-bed drying
• Functionality
• Powder reconstitution
• Product quality
• Spray drying

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The work is mainly supported by the ARC Discovery Grant (Project Ref. DP0773688). We also acknowledge the Gardiner Foundation 2007–2009 Major Grant in collaboration with Diary Innovation Australia Ltd. The authors thank Manisha Patel for her help in preparing this manuscript.