Two ways which efficient filtration technology can enhance your flavor production

Market Research company Data Bridge expects the global food flavors market to reach 29M USD by 2030. The industries demand for new, authentic flavors and tastes are achieved by experimenting with new recipes and using quality ingredients, innovative formulation, and efficient production methods to satisfy consumer demand. Selecting the right filtration technology can lead to optimum throughput, reliability, and quality parameters. Here are two ways in which filtration technology can enhance your flavor production.

The most common processes to produce unique and consistent flavors are:

• Pressing fruits, flowers and leaves to acquire the essential oils
• Concentrating and dewaxing oil
• CO₂ extraction, filtering insoluble plant matter and removing the solvent to get oleoresin
• Steam distillation process to enhance essential oils characteristics
• Separation of aqueous/ethanol/PG solution from oil emulsion
• Separation of a compound from a flavor blend mixture
• Coalescing of flavor washes

A guide to efficient flavor manufacturing:

The guiding principle for flavor processing is to expose the raw materials to minimum treatment and heating,, light mixing and pumping, and avoiding oxygen pickup. Typically, the forming components are incorporated in closed systems to prevent volatile losses, which could lead to reducing its flavor profile.

As part of the final product manufacturing process, such as non-alcoholic drinks, flavors are added to the product to ensure consistency. For example, particles of turbidity which can be formed during chilling of beverage is undesirable by manufacturers and end consumers.

After the initial extraction or concentration process, flavors may have characteristics that prevent them from being readily used in food applications, like wax levels, visible particles and colloidal haze. Physical chemistry is the key to understanding flavors behavior and getting acceptance from the quality assurance team, including their cold test/cloud point, causes of turbidity and organoleptic characteristics. Flavors are chilled for a certain period and temperature to confirm there will be no haze formation– hence the name, cloud point. Further processing may be needed to convert them into usable forms (e.g., removal of oil traces), reducing unwanted characteristics.

Three ways Pall’s specialist team can enhance your flavors process: 

Our SLS Global Technical Support team understands the manufacturers' challenges at every stage in the production. The solutions we provide are flexible enough to switch between products safely and consistently, increasing or decreasing capacity as requirements change, increasing production yield volume and reducing production time. We work closely with our customers, supporting innovation and modernization of old manufacturing ways.

1) Essential Oil Processing

Whether a new or existing formula, we can offer an optimized filtration solution that will help increase yield and capacity while maintaining the liquid's quality. An appropriate filtration system can then be constructed, configured , and installed. It is possible to use essential oils directly in beverages and solid products, add them to emulsions or encapsulate them for applications. The oil must be free from particles and wax before spray-drying, as this will block nozzles and contribute to product haziness and oxidation, hence resulting in processes not running at optimal levels and changes in flavor profile. To address this, SLS can conduct small-scale trials with different essential oils (e.g., citrus oils) to later integrate the best solution into large-scale production. Our equipment offers optimum throughput, reliability, and quality parameters.

2) Efficient dewaxing

In the dewaxing process for products that require refrigeration, the oil or flavor mixture is winterized (chilled) and filtered. This procedure ensures that the oil will not partially solidify in the refrigerator or cause haziness in the final product where the oil is added. However, as the chilling and filtration processes must be repeated twice or more to give a product a specific cloud point value, the entire process can take several days. Using paper filtration or filter sheets may make the process even more time-consuming if filtration is inefficient.

By reducing the chilling time and filtration time to a single pass, Pall’s unique filter sheet based SUPRA technologies enable sustainability by reducing the chilling time from a week to a few days due to its high filtration and adsorption efficiency. These technologies comprise SUPRApak™ and SUPRAdisc™ filter modules in a closed system approach to high-capacity depth filtration, maximizing product protection and minimizing product losses, providing a cost-effective alternative to classical sheet filtration.

3) Clarification of flavor extracts

Depending on the extraction process used for aqueous/ethanolic flavors, manufacturers may worry about coarse and small particles left in the product (e.g., very fine coffee bean particles). They represent a production bottleneck since removing these materials may take a lot of time for settling, centrifugation, etc. In addition, Pall offers a range of stainless steel, polypropylene or PES filter bags and cartridges of different ratings to remove such particles with a broad size distribution. This way, the extract will have the clarity, turbidity and brightness desired by the customer.

SLS team is also involved in this step, performing turbidity removal small scale trials, using small discs of the same media chosen by the customer, ensuring the final NTU achieved is inside the accepted level. Later, the team help in large scale trials and commissioning the filtration system.

The SLS team is involved in many innovative and exciting projects, such as the sterile filtration of hydrosols. A hydrophilic fraction of the essential oil, rich in organoleptic compounds, goes into the water phase during plant distillation. This process yields pure water (hydrosol) with oil particles frequently discarded. Now, hydrosol is used in cocktails and alcohol-free beverages, adding complex yet subtle flavors.

For more information on flavor filtration, visit our dedicated flavors filtration pages