At this year’s Anuga FoodTec, Brabender GmbH & Co. KG is present with its own trade fair booth. The leading international trade fair for the food and beverage industry in Cologne with more than 50,000 visitors from all over the world has been postponed to 26-29 April 2022 due to the pandemic. “At the fair, we will be presenting the new Convimeter II viscometer, the TwinLab-F 20/40 twin-screw extruder for product and process development on a laboratory scale, the MT-CA moisture analyzer and the ViscoQuick viscometer”, explains Markus Löns, Business Development Manager Food and Feed at Brabender. The range of applications for the measuring instruments is wide: they can be used in the production of meat substitutes, snack and baked goods, doughs, puddings, sweets and noodles, for example.

Convimeter II: A wide range of applications

The new Convimeter II from Brabender enables inline measurement of viscosity during the production process and can thus be used to determine the consistency of wafer doughs, pudding creams in pudding pretzels and jams in donuts, among other things. “The advantage of the Convimeter II is direct access to current viscosity data for production monitoring and quality assurance”, says Löns. However, the Convimeter II offers potential uses not only for the baked goods sector and can be used universally, e.g. in the snack food sector, for viscosity measurement of chocolates and fillings in baked products as well as snack foods.

Product development of innovative foods

Extrusion with the TwinLab-F 20/40 twin-screw extruder enables meat substitutes to be developed, as well as other products made from lentils. These include gluten-free pasta made from lentils, lupine flips and expanded lentil snacks. The machine is also suitable for optimising and developing new recipes for snack products, breakfast cereals and dough or confectionery products on a laboratory scale. Thus, by varying the parameters of screw speed, temperature and shear in their interplay, diverse product innovations, such as chewing gum without plastic and chocolate rice, are possible during extrusion.

The ViscoQuick is used for the analysis of starch-based raw materials. Thus, the device is particularly useful for applications in the baking and pasta industry. “For many baked goods, the ratio of starch and flour is important. That’s why many customers in the baked food industry also have product solutions from us”, Markus Löns underlines.

Cooling during ViscoQuick measurement saves time

The ViscoQuick measures the viscosity behaviour of starch and flours after gelatinisation at low temperatures (e.g. 30 °C or room temperature). The advantage of the device compared to other devices is the better and faster cooling: “The cooling phase stops at 50 °C in most measurements so far. With the ViscoQuick, better and faster cooling can easily be achieved than with previous laboratory devices”, says Löns.

The cooling also offers the possibility to detect additional quality differences between different raw materials, which only become visible at temperatures below 50 °C. With this additional viscosity data, starch producing and processing industries can save time via the fast heating/cooling ramps.

Faster measurement results of oil absorption of legume flour

One of Brabender’s latest applications has been developed in cooperation with Müller’s Mühle. The two companies have developed a time-saving measuring method using Brabender’s Absorptometer C and measuring kneader for the oil absorption of legume flour. In the production of meat substitutes from legume flour, the oil absorption properties of the flour are important for the appropriate oil addition in an extrusion process. Within three minutes and only a few steps, the oil absorption of the flour could be determined. The classic determination of the oil absorption of flour by means of the pipetting method requires significantly more work steps and takes more than an hour.

Brabender will be present at Anuga FoodTec on all days of the fair in Hall 5.2 at Stand C070 and will show its range of products and services.