Food

Many food ingredients are spray dried. Examples are vegetable powder, whey powder, fruit powder, egg powder, or coffee creamer. During production caking can occur at the inner walls of the spray drier, which makes regular cleaning necessary. The addition of AEROSIL^® fumed silica directly into the spray tower, separately from the spray dried slurry, reduces the caking and avoids expensive downtimes. Furthermore, this modus operandi saves an additional mixing step and increases the throughput. This is the most efficient way to apply silica as a flow- and anticaking aid.

Spray-dried fruit powder without and with AEROSIL® 200	Spray-dried vegetable powders with AEROSIL® fumed silica

Food products that are dissolved in water sometimes show retarded wetting or build up lumps, when stirred into water. One further advantage of the addition of a hydrophilic AEROSIL^® grade to such a powder is a better wettability and a reduction or even no formation of lumps. This is due to the fact that the silica envelops the powder, thus acting as a space holder between the individual powder particles leading the water into the spaces. In addition the extremely fine AEROSIL^® fumed silica provides good colour retention of powders and a high transparency once these powders are stirred into water.

Powdered products are shipped throughout the world and stored under different climate conditions. Changing temperature and humidity during transport and storage may lead to caking of these products, which makes it more difficult for the final user to process them. The addition of AEROSIL^®-products helps to avoid agglomeration efficiently, enabling producers of such powders to deliver a constant product quality to every place of the world. Due to the high absorptivity of the silica, food powder products treated with AEROSIL^® fumed silica show extended storage stability.