GEA Niro dryers are designed to fulfill stringent quality requirements demanded by the food industry.
When working with products made from natural ingredients it is desirable to retain the natural properties and qualities in the final powder form. This is possible for some products, while others involve a recipe containing additional carriers, antioxidants, pH-stabilizers and so forth.
Several juices has been dried to a powder as a flavour product where the concentrated juices or single strength juices are mixed into a flavour base made from e.g. maltodextrin, sugar and gum arabic. The reconstituted powders with this recipe are not real 'juices' however, they are called nectar. These powders can often be dried on conventional spray dryers, multistage dryers, or the FILTERMAT®.
Tomato
This special fruit is spray dried in large amounts from a concentrated paste. The powder is prepared from Hot Break paste or Cold Break paste. The paste used is strained free of skin, seeds and long fibres, and is concentrated to a maximum of 45 °Brix for Hot Break and 50 ° Brix for Cold Break. GEA Niro has designed a special spray dryer to handle tomatoes, which is the most used tomato dryer worldwide. GEA Niro technology also allows for drying of tomato paste on the FILTERMAT®. The tomato powder can be produced without including any additives on the GEA Niro dryers.
Fruit
Strained pulp from fruits and berries is freed from skin, seeds and long fibers to create a paste which can be spray dried in this form, or with only a limited addition of carrier.
Few of these powders result in reconstituted products close to the original paste in respect to retaining the natural properties like colour, flavour, taste and texture. The FILTERMAT® is the most attractive dryer for production of high-quality powders from these fruit and berry pastes.
Fruit juice
Reconstituted powder can only contain a maximum of 3% additives, such as sucrose on solid base, to be called juice. Real juice powder maintains a high concentration of natural fruit fibres in the juice, this is produced using the FILTERMAT®dryer.
Vegetables
Spray drying of vegetables is feasible when these exist as juice or a paste, as described above. Due to the composition of vegetable juice fewer carriers are required during the drying process. Filtered and concentrated vegetable paste or juices are normally dried as flavours, and are mostly dried on conventional dryers and multistage dryers.
The paste, free of skin and long fibres, is likely to be concentrated, and give great products when dried on the FILTERMAT® dryer. These products can normally be dried without additives, typically resulting in products which can compete easily with freeze dried powders in quality properties and texture.
Market
GEA Niro is the single largest supplier of tomato dryers and FILTERMAT® dryers, and has gained experience with spraying juices and paste from a variety of fruits, berries and vegetables. The drying capacity ranges between 50 - 800 kg final powders per hour, depending on product.
The online news service, Dairy Reporter has a brief description of GEA Niro in which readers are informed about GEA Niro' spray dryers' ability to fulfil quality requirements when producing powders for the food industry.
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