Make a batch of mayo before you can finish a bag of fries
Moliere famously said that slow-growing trees bear the best fruit. Clearly, the 17th-century playwright never ran a mayonnaise production facility.
In food manufacturing, once the recipe is developed and reproducible, every minute lost is an extra cost.
“Time is money,” reminds us Rolf Schmidt, “But time efficiency means the highest quantity at the highest quality.”
Superior dispersal starts with the droplets
As a food processing expert at IKA Process Equipment, Rolf isn’t simply throwing around platitudes. The processing equipment firm existing for more than 110 years, has developed a unique dispersing machine for uniformly dispersing the oil phase in the aqueous phase at high speed.
“We have put our very long experience in dispersing techniques into our dispersing machine DBI,” says Rolf as he explains the technology of the Standard Production Plant (SPP) series. Conventional machines add the oil to the water and then often need to further homogenize the mixture, whereas the IKA machine allows to shorten this process.
The IKA technique comminutes oil materials directly when distributing them into the circulating water. The heart of the system is the rotor-stator. As the oil phase travels through the high-shear mechanism, it breaks down into uniform fine droplets.
Mayonnaise is around 80% oil, whereas making mayonnaise on an industrial scale starts with a 100% water phase and introduces oil droplets at high intensity until they reach the accurate recipe ratio. Directly dispersing the oil in the mixture shortens the processing time and increases the dispersal efficiency.
Process 500 liters of mayo in 5 minutes
Rolf points out that it’s not only the way of downsizing drops that make the technique faster: “Our solution actively pumps the oil into the dispersing machine, injecting it with a higher speed than in common systems.”
The unique design of the dispersing machine facilitates the efficient dispersal of the droplets. It allows to integrate the oil faster and more efficiently than in common systems. In Rolf’s customer experience, this often decreases the processing time by more than half. In fact, the SPP 500 system can produce 500L of mayonnaise in just 5 minutes.
With new varieties launched every year, the mayo market has been evolving rapidly since the original recipes of 18th-century France. That was long after Moliere’s time, but had he tried the condiment, he would have discarded his own advice and advocated instead for faster production.
