HRS Heat Exchangers, Stand LU-7732, PACK EXPO International, Chicago, Illinois, November 3-6
HRS Heat Exchangers will showcase their wide range of equipment for the food and beverage industry, including processes such as heating & cooling, pasteurization, aseptic filling, pumping, ice re-melting, cleaning-in-place (CIP) and waste stream at PACK EXPO International 2024 this November. As always, the HRS team will be easy to spot on Stand LU-7732 thanks to their bright orange shoes.
Heat exchangers for challenging food products – Challenging Foodstuffs images
Thermal treatments using heat exchangers, such as pasteurization, heating and cooling, are a feature of the manufacture of multiple food and beverage products. Five of the most challenging foodstuffs in terms of thermal processing, and the heat exchanger solutions to help manufacturers handle them correctly, are outlined below:
1. Highly viscous materials
Highly viscous foods, including nut butters and other fat-based products, can be almost solid at low temperatures. This creates a number of challenges, including moving the material through the heat exchanger. Other considerations include preventing fouling and ensuring an even temperature.
Nut butter can be one of the most difficult products to handle, and so a heavy duty rotating scraped surface heat exchanger (SSHE) is required. With its larger motor, bigger scrapers and extra mounting points, the HRS RHD Series was specifically designed for such tough materials.
2. Products containing pieces
The challenge when dealing with pieces of product (from small, diced vegetables to large fruit pieces) is ensuring the mixture moves through the process at a constant speed without damaging the physical integrity of the product.
The Unicus Series of reciprocal SSHE is perfect as the separately controlled hydraulic scrapers are available in a range of designs and are fully controllable.
3. Thermally challenging products
Some ingredients, such as eggs or chocolate, are very sensitive to temperature and must be processed at precise temperatures to avoid damaging the product. Liquid egg, for example, is extremely delicate as the proteins in egg are more sensitive to heat than other products, such as milk or juices. The white and yolk are distinct components with different compositions and behaviors: egg white is denatured at 136°F while yolk is denatured at 149°F.
If not handled correctly, thermal pasteurization can decrease protein content, change physical characteristics such as texture and color, and increase product viscosity. Depending on the required handling, corrugated tube heat exchangers or gentle SSHEs (like the HRS Unicus Series) are ideal for processing liquid eggs and other egg-based products.
Tempering chocolate is also extremely difficult. Without strict temperature control, the crystals formed are of different sizes and the resulting chocolate will ‘bloom,’ having a matt appearance and waxy texture.
The HRS R Series has been successfully used to commercially temper chocolate, raising the temperature, cooling it back down, and then raising it again so the chocolate can be transported and worked elsewhere.
4. Delicate products
Many sauces, and some dairy products, need to be handled delicately in order to avoid splitting or shearing, while careful temperature control is required to avoid the creation of undesirable flavors, such as a burnt taste.
The solution is a gentle yet thermally efficient reciprocating SSHE, such as the HRS Unicus Series.
5. Very dense materials
Globally, there is increasing interest in using heat exchangers to process mechanically deboned meat (MDM), meat slurry and viscera components. One advantage is that heat exchangers have the potential to generate products with better quality, at lower cost and with less waste and lower energy consumption than via traditional methods of heating and cooling MDM.
The HRS RHD Series has been employed commercially to keep meat viscera and similar materials below a specified temperature of 39°F. Because it ensures thorough mixing, slugging does not occur.
Some heat exchanger developers will not offer solutions for certain food products because they are so challenging in terms of physical and thermal handling. HRS Heat Exchangers has spent the last forty years specializing in developing heat exchangers and processing systems for these most difficult products. To find out how HRS can help you heat, cool, pasteurize, sterilize or process your challenging food and drink products, please contact us today.
Solutions for processing plant-based foodstuffs – Plant-based images
The last two years have seen a slowdown in investment by the global food and drink industry, particularly in terms of products containing added sugar. However, plant-based drinks and alternative proteins have continued to grow as a sector.
At HRS Heat Exchangers we are definitely seeing more demand from manufacturers of plant-based drinks, and not just those using traditional ingredients like soy and oat, but others such as coconut or rice. From our perspective, the actual ingredient is less relevant than its properties. From a design point of view, the material’s viscosity, thermal conductivity and how it flows are more important. Once we’ve established those parameters we can design an efficient heat exchanger.
The ultra-heat treatment (UHT) of soy-, nut- and oat-based milk alternatives is fundamentally the same process as for dairy and, given our experience in dairy processing (together with the increasing use of our systems for handling meat products), makes us well placed to provide solutions both for plant-based drinks and alternative proteins.
One of our particular specialisms is dealing with viscous materials, whether that’s milk or yoghurt alternatives, plant-based spreads or nut butters. Another consideration is providing manufacturers with flexible equipment that adapts as their product offerings evolve.
In addition, our long-term relationship with Spain’s National Technological Centre for the Food and Canning Industry (CTNC), as well as our range of skid-mounted trial systems, means that we are ideally placed to help manufacturers develop the optimal thermal process for new, reformulated or existing products.
In recent years we have also added the HRS Direct Steam Injection (DSI) System to our range of pasteurization and sterilization systems. For products such as plant-based milk alternatives this provides rapid heating without cooking the product, preventing the formation of caramel-type compounds or unwanted flavors.
To learn more about our full range of heat exchangers and systems for the food and beverage industry – including solutions for plant-based products and difficult to handle food products – visit HRS Heat Exchangers on LU-7732 at PACK EXPO International on 3-6 November at McCormick Place in Chicago, Illinois – or simply look for the people wearing orange shoes!
Innovations in Food (& Beverage) Processing & Packaging is a quarterly magazine distributed globally both in Print and Digital formats. www.innovationsfood.com. Twitter: @Innovfoodtech. Instagram: @innovationsinfoodtechnology. Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/terry-prior52
