Laboratory-Scale Extrusion: Open the Black Box of Extrusion Processing for Improved Product Development Food extrusion is a black box technology that many approach with a trial-and-error mentality. Although there is certainly some tweaking and overall fine-tuning necessary to dial in the proper extrusion settings for a given product concept, there is also a more direct way to generate the desired product the first time. Starting the product development process with laboratory-scale equipment before scale-up and understanding the relationships among extruder setup, process conditions, and product properties can make designing the extrusion process for a new product concept more predictable and lead to vastly improved results. It starts with defining how the extruder is or will be used in the application. Is the extruder meant to be a continuous cooker (e.g., cooking a protein mass into a continuous viscous mass) or a structuring agent in which hydration and mechanical factors are more important (e.g., texturized vegetable proteins)? Defining this, as well as the desired raw materials or formulation, makes it easier to design trials that help the developer more quickly zero in on the appropriate process controls. As is frequently said, all experiments are designed—the degree of success is determined by how well they are designed. Laboratory-scale extrusion provides an excellent framework for successfully designing new product concepts. |