Spray Drying of Vegetables

It is desirable to retain as many of the natural properties and qualities in the final powder as possible. This can be done for some vegetables, but for others a recipe must be made containing additional carriers, antioxidants, pH-stabilizers and so forth.

Vegetables can be spray dried when they exist as juice* or a paste. The amount of carrier used for the juices will normally be less than for the fruit juices, due to vegetable juice composition. The filtered and concentrated juices are normally dried as flavors, and are mostly dried on conventional dryers and multistage dryers.

The pastes which are strained free of skin and long fibers will normally be concentrated, and yield very good products when dried on the FILTERMAT® Integrated Belt Spray Dryer. These products can normally be dried without additives, typically resulting in high-quality products which can compete easily with freeze dried powders.

Niro FILTERMAT® Integrated Belt Spray Dryer The Niro FILTERMAT® Integrated Belt Spray Dryer is developed to meet the special needs of continuous production of agglomerated powders, especially involving products that are difficult to dry due to their high fat content, hydroscopicity and/or thermoplasticity.

* Juice

Juice is a quality name and can only be used to describe a reconstituted powder if the powder contains a maximum of 3% additives, such as sucrose on solid base. Real juice powder is made when a high concentration of natural fibers remains in the juice. This has only been possible for a few juices. The dryer for these powders is the FILTERMAT®.

Several juices has been dried to a powder as a flavor product where the concentrated juices or single strength juices are mixed into a flavour base made from e.g. maltodextrin, sugar and gum arabic. The reconstituted powders with this recipe are not real 'juices'. These powders can often be dried on conventional spray dryers, multistage dryers, or the FILTERMAT® Integrated Belt Spray Dryer.