amixon®
Vegan & Plant-Based Food Manufacturing
Demand for healthy, ethical, and tasty alternatives to animal protein is growing. As consumers everywhere are beginning to make plant-based meats and other vegan products a mainstay in their diets, food industry businesses of every ilk are expanding their vegan product offerings.
Industrial mixers are a crucial piece of equipment in the production of plant-based foods, helping manufacturers develop new product formulations, ensure hygiene, and scale their processes to peak efficiency and profitability.
Most meat substitutes are produced by wetting and then extruding a dry protein mixture that often consists of over 30 different components: spices, flavor enhancers, preservatives, binding agents, vitamins and minerals, thickening agents, texturizers, emulsifiers, lipids, aromas, leavening agents, coloring agents, and stabilizers, to name a few.
Each of these ingredients plays a distinct role in helping the plant-based meat product achieve the right taste, texture, and appearance. If any ingredients are not adequately homogenized into the mixture, the resulting products could display significant quality issues.
Because the assorted ingredients used in plant-based food production have highly variable physical properties, achieving homogeneity is challenging. Too much shear during mixing can shatter delicate particle structures that are needed for the product to adequately coagulate and attain a fibrous, meaty texture.
amixon® mixers are specially designed for the kind of challenges that confront plant-based meat companies:
At high volumes, automated continuous production processes are more cost effective. But continuous processes are hard to implement at facilities using many ingredients and needing frequent recipe changes.
The AMK mixer from amixon® offers a state-of-the-art solution to this unique processing challenge: it is a continuous mixer that also doubles as a precision batch mixer. This allows plant-based food producers to precisely homogenize complex base mixes on the batch setting before adding bulk ingredients on the continuous setting.
The flexibility offered by amixon® mixers is highly valuable from the perspective of new product development, giving plant-based food producers the chance to easily test small batches of experimental recipes.
And for facilities that produce any number of products with different recipes, a single amixon® mixer can effectively process a range of varying formulations.
The HM twin-shaft mixer ensures excellent mixing results with a wide range of processing functions, a gentle yet effective mixing action, and hygienic design features.
In this white paper you'll learn about: