The role of liquid dosing in food and drink is vital for various reasons, such as enhancing the aesthetics, altering flavouring, conforming to health and safety, and creating product consistency. In this blog, we’ll explore how companies could be utilising liquid dosing and adding flavour and colourants to food and drink produce with the aid of a game-changing Quantex pump.
As previously mentioned in our blog ‘Adding Colourants via Liquid Dosing – How to Achieve Mess-Free Rapid Changeovers with Quantex Pumps’ we discussed that liquid dosing (also known as liquid metering) is the controlled mixing of liquid solutions together to make a final product. Whilst this blog will focus on food and beverage produce, liquid dosing can also be used in many potential applications including:
- Household chemical industry to add dyes to detergent.
- Perfume industry to perfectly mix fragrances.
- Plastic or printing industry to add colourant to products.
- Petrochemical industry to dose additives like catalysts and odorants.
- Launderettes when controlled measures of cleaning solutions are added into the washing cycle.
- Emulsion paint suppliers who need to alter the pigment of the paint solution to change its colour.
The Role of Colour in Food and Beverage Products
Colour plays a crucial role in the food and beverage industry; it can influence consumer perception, enhance product appeal, and even create flavour profiles. Some of the main ways colour is important to food and beverage produce include:
1. Enhancing Visual Appeal:
- Consumer Attraction: Vibrant colours can attract consumers and make products stand out on shelves.
- Brand Identity: Consistent colour usage can help establish a brand's identity and recognition.
- Overriding flavour: Strong colour cues can even override the actual flavour of the food, for example, studies found that adding an odourless, tasteless red dye to a white wine causes it to be described by experts as a red wine.
- Appealing to a larger audience: When presented with chocolate M&M’s of one colour, participants in this study selected fewer than those who were presented with a range of colourful chocolate M&M’s. By offering a range of colours, participants are more likely to purchase in higher quantities.
2. Suggesting Flavor Profiles by Colour:
- Consumer Expectations: Certain colours are associated with specific flavours. For example, red often suggests berry or cherry flavours, while green might imply mint or lime.
- Misleading Perceptions: While colour can be a powerful cue, it's important to ensure that the flavour matches the visual expectation to avoid consumer disappointment. The expectation to this though, is unless the product is specifically designed to be false e.g. mismatched colour and flavouring sweets - the surprise factor overrules the colour and flavouring combination.
3. Masking Imperfections:
- Colour Correction: Colorants can be used to mask natural variations in colour that may occur due to factors like ageing or processing.
- Adding Food Additives: By adding antioxidants, the lifespan of processed food and beverage produce can be increased as it slows down the time for food to become rancid or change colour by reducing the chance of fats combining with oxygen.
4. Compliance with Regulations:
- Legal Requirements: In many regions, food and beverage manufacturers must comply with specific regulations regarding the use of colourants and food additives. These regulations often dictate which colours can be used and in what quantities, and manufacturers must follow these rules.
Liquid Dosing and Chocolate
Liquid dosing is often used during the basic manufacture of chocolate, but it can also incorporate additional colourants to enhance its appeal or create a variety of chocolate-based flavours. Some common uses include:
- Coloured Chocolate Shells: These are often used for candies and truffles, creating visually striking chocolates.
- Marbled Chocolate: By combining chocolate of different colours, manufacturers can create unique patterns and textures.
- Flavour-Specific Colors: Chocolate can be coloured to match the flavour profile, such as green for mint chocolate or pink for strawberry.
- Small doses of enhanced flavours: Some chocolates have flavours added to them to create a specific chocolate e.g. caramel sea salt, fruit, alcohol etc.
By adding colour and flavour to the chocolate profile, it can evoke a specific and flavourful reaction, create a visual narrative and make a product that consumers will repeatedly purchase.
Chocolate itself, however, is a highly viscous product, but
the final viscosity of the chocolate depends on how the chocolate is treated, its additional ingredients and how it is manufactured.
Quantex is known for being able to easily handle the high level of viscosity associated with chocolate due to the advanced transfer capabilities of the pumps. Using a positive displacement rotary action, with high vacuum and high-pressure capability, our pumps can dispense or transfer chocolate solutions at lower temperatures than many other pumps can.
The above video shows the Quantex QX25-SD pumping chocolate syrup at room temperature (20 degrees Celsius) as well as chilled (to 4 degrees Celsius). Quantex pumps are powerful enough to dispense viscous fluids across distances, including cooling areas, without damaging or curing the chocolate solution. They can even pump particulates if the chocolate has small caramel pieces or salt/sugar crystals, fruit or nut pieces.
The Difficulties of Adding Flavourings and Colourants to Liquid Dosing
Since the flavour or colourant is typically added to a larger solution as part of the liquid dosing process, it’s often supplied in a highly concentrated version. However, unless handled correctly this colourant solution can be extremely messy and difficult to handle, making pack changeovers complicated and time-consuming.
These highly concentrated solutions of flavour or colour are often quite expensive so manufacturers require minimum waste and damages.
When a partially full or empty pack is swapped out and replaced, any remnants of colour or flavour could be spilt, causing stains on machinery, equipment, products, or the maintenance crew. These product spills could be hazardous, but could also leave long-lasting, undesirable stains as well as costing the company a lot of money via wasted products.
With Quantex pumps that attach directly to the liquid pack, we dramatically reduce this risk making it much easier, safer, cleaner and quicker to handle liquid colourant.
Minimising Mess, Downtime and Wastage
Quantex pumps are the perfect solution when it comes to liquid dosing, saving downtime, minimising the risk of spills and sucking out every last drop so there’s no wastage. Our Bag-In-Box pumps can be attached directly to the product packaging and filled with the flavouring or colourant solution and are designed to be easily replaced along with each new pack.
Quick Changeovers
When the product is fully dispensed, the bag can simply be swapped in and out of a machine in a matter of seconds with minimal training and drips (thanks to the reverse cycling capability of Quantex pumps). This removes the need for the product to travel through any additional fixed machinery and eliminates the risk of potential spills and mess.
Simple Operation
With only a standard motor drive and motor controller required, dispensing machinery can be highly compact and low-cost as no cleaning, maintenance and calibration are required. The Quantex pumps also act as a check valve which keeps the liquid optimally hygienic and air-free, reducing the risk of product spoiling/ congealing.
No Drips
The pumps can reverse cycle to suck product back in at the end of each dispense which is how drips are prevented. This happens alongside the continuous continuous benefit of our pumps removing the risk of pigments being contaminated during the liquid dosing procedure.
Enabling Higher Concentrations
As Quantex pumps are able to propel thick highly-concentrated, viscous solutions, they allow companies to take water out of the distribution channel and transfer concentrated solutions (reducing their carbon footprint and transportation costs), which can be another cost-saving and environmentally friendly benefit.
Accurate Quantities of Flavour and Colourant via Liquid Dosing
At Quantex, our range of pumps makes it possible for companies to dispense the correct amount of flavour or colour due to the unique method of precision pumping and in-pump dilution (when required). The pumps operate using a fixed displacement rotary pump principle consisting of the volume of an individual cavity of liquid product carried on the rotor constrained within the rigid pump housing. This ensures that an accurate volume of liquid is displaced for each revolution over a wide range of flow rates, pressures, viscosities and temperatures.
By measuring and dosing the correct volume of colour to the mix, food and beverage manufacturers can be assured that the final solution is the intended one, removing the risk of poor product quality.
Adding Flavour and Colourants to Food and Drink Produce with Quantex Pumps
When it comes to adding flavour and colourants to food and drink produce via liquid dosing, there are endless possibilities. By also leveraging the power of Quantex pumps, companies can guarantee a mess-free, minimal-wastage, rapid colour changeover that’s also accurate and efficient during the manufacture of their food and beverage.
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If you’d like to discuss how a Quantex pump could work for you, please email quantex-info@psgdover.com or call +49 (2065) 89205-0.