Blending is one of the most common and universal unit operations. Blending is used in everyday life anytime you cook and add ingredients to make a dish. So how does blending differ in manufacturing?

Here are four ways premixes will save you time, and ten ways a premix will save you money.

For fortifying or enriching food, beverage, or supplement products, why should you consider using a nutrient premix? Why use a Premix when you could formulate with the individual nutrients? In short, with a premix, you save time and money, and you save yourself development stress because you are getting expert guidance from your supplier and the benefits of advanced technology.

The basic principle of spray drying hinges on water removal but how you remove that water can make a significant difference on the product quality.

A growing number of consumer products are being fortified to help deliver essential vitamins and minerals to the end user. Companies must determine the optimal way to deliver the recommended daily allowance (RDA) for that nutrient. Premixes are one of the ways that companies like Watson are able to deliver the nutrient profile a consumer desires. Since many functional food ingredients can compose a product, processing technology must be looked at as well

There are many benefits that can be achieved through microencapsulation. Knowing when to use this technology is key to formulating products that will be successful in the market.

Microencapsulation is applying a coating to small particles to isolate the substrate. People might microencapsulate in order to mask a bitter or bad taste. Ingredients could be encapsulated in order to provide a barrier from other ingredients for example, to improve stability. Ingredients might be encapsulated to provide a specific temperature release (as in a baking application), or a pH release, or a sustained or modified release. All of these reasons for encapsulation could be accomplished at Watson Inc. using their expertise in fluid bed microencapsulation.

It’s more than masking flavors or improving stability. Microencapsulation allows for changing physical properties like color, or changing oils to powders. You can also control or delay a release of an active.

Instantizing is a subset of agglomeration for the specific purpose of helping powders to mix better with a liquid. Smaller particles can tend to float on top of a liquid and not break the surface tension. By agglomerating, we are making the particles larger, and cause them not to float, but submerge into the water. Fluid bed processing can generate very porous granules, where the water wicks into their insides, causing them to sink and eventually dissolve. 

Agglomeration does many things for tablets. The first is it improves the flowability of the blend to be tableted. The better it flows, the more uniform the weight from tablet to tablet will be. Agglomeration can also improve the uniformity of the active ingredients you are looking to deliver in each tablet. In a multi component blend, segregation could be taking place as the blend is transferred.

One of the critical characteristics often overlooked in processing is raw material particle size and morphology. A gram of a smaller particle has much more surface area than a gram of a larger particle. This amount of surface area affects the rate of solubility. Therefore the particle size can have an effect on taste, as well as the more obvious mouth feel.