Case Study - Instant Microspheres
You like the convenience of instant coffee or other instant drinks? Just add water and enjoy! Well, what you maybe never liked was that those drinks don't dissolve evenly, you never know exactly how much you need as all those lumps and powders stick together. We have the solution: BRACE Microspheres, made with wonderful ingredients as all natural coffee, tea, juices. You see the perfect spheres, you smell the wonderful flavor or see the carefully prepared particles, that fill your spoon perfectly. Enjoy your drink with all your senses!
The production of completely round instant Microspheres offers numerous advantages in physical properties and thus also advantages in their production for the beverage industry. These Microspheres are formed using the well-known BRACE drip casting process, which generates Microspheres with a narrow size distribution from a laminar liquid flow through a vibrating nozzle. These processes produce particles with a particle size from 20 µm up to 10000 µm with monomodal partical size distributions with a single sharp maximum dmin/dmax-values lower 1.10 or even 1.05, 1.01 with further process optimization.
In numerous microencapsulation applications, the process has been successfully used for years. The innovation is now the use of e.g. coffee, tea or fruit concentrates as input material to form uniform Microspheres. By solidification in a falling tower, which can be cooled down to minus 100 °C with liquid nitrogen, the extract spheres can be collected at the end of the falling section. These Microspheres are then fed directly to a freeze dryer and everything ends with a beautiful round instant product for the customer. Instant Microspheres thus combine the advantages of the BRACE drip casting process, physical properties of uniformly shaped spheres with the advantages of freeze-drying.
With traditional methods of producing instant products, a large part of the production (up to 40 % dusty material) is returned to the production for recycling. With this method almost the entire input material can be processed (with the exception of start-up and shut-down losses). In addition to the structural advantages of the spherical shape (e.g. better dosing properties), freeze-drying can be much better adjusted due to the monomodal particle size distribution. There is no need to pay attention to large particles, which leads to overdrying of the smaller ones. This leads to a perfect preservation of the advantages of freeze-drying, hardly any loss of structure, vitamins and aromas. A full tasty benefit for the customer. Not only that uniformly sized spheres dissolve more evenly during preparation, they also look even better. As we all know, the eye drinks with.
BRACE received 2019 at the Food Ingredients Europe the "High Commendation Award" for the Instant Technology.
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