The food processing and handling industry is heavily reliant on anti-caking agents to safeguard manufacturing efficiency and preserve the value of powdered ingredients and products. Driven by innovation and evolving customer preferences, this is an industry showing healthy expansion with the food handling and processing equipment market predicted to exhibit a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.5% up to 2026. Against this backdrop there is rising demand for new, high-performance additives that meet changing needs, notably to displace ingredients that are controversial or of undesirable provenance. For example, silica is an effective, widely used anti-caking agent but use is becoming increasingly controversial due to concerns over nanoparticles.
In this article, published in Powder and Bulk Solids, we describe collaborative work on new anti-caking agents carried out with Omya (Oftringen, Switzerland) a leading global producer of calcium carbonate. A primary focus is the application of advanced powder testing (FT4 Powder Rheometer®, Freeman Technology) to assess heterogeneous caking behaviour – crusting – to rigorously assess potential candidates.
Click here to read ‘Developing new anti-caking agents: Using powder testing to identify high-performance candidates’ in full.