Combined innovative heat pump drying technologies and new cold extrusion techniques for production of instant foods

There is an increased demand for convenient foods including ready-to-eat and instant products. These products are desired with minimum concentration of synthetic chemicals. This creates challenges for the food industry and dryers manufactures to develop new technologies to process difficult-sensitive materials and to supply final products with high quality and improved properties. Fruits and vegetables are mainly composed of water, carbohydrates, proteins and lipids. Due to modification of chemical and physical bonds the compounds the material becomes viscous and sticky during processing. Conventional dryers have limitations in handling such sensitive materials. Heat pump dryers have been applied in the production of a diversity of ready-to-eat foods and dried instant products for the last five years at SINTEF-NTNU. Besides being energetically efficient and environmentally friendly, the heat pump drying technology provides a wide range of drying conditions as required to produce powders with improved characteristics. This work describes the new technologies and processing line for the production of instant foods as well as the measurements on the properties and quality attributes for raw, intermediate and final instant products.