FOOD SCIENCE

The first extruders were designed in Germany in the late eighteen hundreds in the food industry to manufacture sausages. Since the 1930s packaged dry pasta and breakfast cereals, have been produced via extrusion, and since the 1950s the same method has been applied to pet food production. An extrusion process is also used to compound animal feed for cattle, fish, dogs and cats.

Why did experts choose an extruder rather than an oven to produce human food or pet food for the many, temperature-sensitive ingredients? The answer, as you probably know, is simple: with an extruder, you can have perfect control over the residence time and the product temperature. Taste and smell are thus reproducible due to the fact that you have complete control over the “Maillard” reactions. Extruders are now being used in the production of many food applications like chewing gum, toffee, Cheddar cheese, liquorice, bread (croutons, breadsticks, and flatbreads), chips, and some baby food.

Déjà vu, we thought, why do you not develop new food and feed ingredients or formulations on a smaller, more efficient scale? We offer a 5 ml GMP compliant micro twin-screw extruder PME 5, or a non GMP compliant MC 5 twin-screw micro compounder, for effectively and reliably developing new, highly viscous food and feed formulations. For bigger samples, we can recommend the MC 15 HT with a 15 ml working volume.

All three instruments have six temperature-controlled zones, a thermocouple in the melt, and two robust barrel halves and screws that will serve you for many years. Also, all process parameters and the most relevant rheological data can be controlled and acquired by easy to use software packages. Finally, scaling-up your R&D results to larger parallel twin-screw extruders is simplified by a proprietary upscaling protocol.