How to make milk powder?
There are three kinds of milk powder production processes: wet process, dry process, and dry-wet composite process. Dry-wet mixing processes are between wet process and dry process. What are the differences between these three processes? Today we will take you to know about them.
1. Wet process
Wet process is mean that fresh cow milk added nutritional ingredients and directly spray-drying it, not only does there exist no milk powder intermediate links but it also adopts a multichannel filtration process to eliminate hidden dangers and ensure the balance of all kinds of milk nutrition. Wet process technology is more complex and requires more equipment. The main equipment for the beginning is milk cleaner, homogenizer, preferably sterilizer, concentration equipment, drying equipment, packaging equipment, and some ancillary equipment, as well as boilers, sewage treatment and so on.
The wet process requires three conditions:
1. There must be pasture.
2. It must have fresh milk;
3. Milk powder processing plants must be required.
The milk powder produced by the wet process has good homogeneity, stable physical and chemical indexes, balanced nutritional components, a full dissolution process of various milk nutrients in fresh milk, and can reduce the secondary pollution of milk powder. The freshness and nutritional value of the final product can be ensured. But not all dairy enterprises’ milk powder can be done by "wet" production. This is mainly determined by the distance between the milk source and the production plant. However, if only use the wet process, some of the thermosensitive nutrients of milk powder are easily destroyed during spray drying, also maybe affect the quality of milk powder.
2. Dry process
The dry process is to add the purchased large package whey powder into the mixing tank, put various solid added nutrients, fully stirred, directly packed out. The dry process technology is relatively simple, mainly mixer, packaging machine, etc.
The nutrient components of heat-sensitive materials in dry process (a kind of materials which are unstable when heated, and are prone to decomposition, polymerization, oxidation, and other deterioration reactions) are easy to add. However, the homogeneity of dairy products produced by the dry process is not as good as that produced by a wet process. Compared with milk powder produced by the wet process, there are also some differences in taste and flavor.
The dry method requires a higher workshop, the GMP workshop is generally used. In order to ensure the safety of milk powder production and processing, the official website of the Food and Drug Administration issued a "Notice on the Work of Examining the Production License of Infant Formula Milk Powder Produced with Imported Base Powder". It stipulates that enterprises are allowed to use imported Base Powder as raw material to produce infant formula milk powder, and enterprises must comply with the "Infant and Child Matching". The dry process as stipulated in the Rules for the Examination of Production License of Milk Powder (2013 edition) is carried out. It is strictly forbidden for enterprises to use imported large package infant formula milk powder for production and packaging. This regulation is bound to increase the cost and investment of milk powder manufacturers.
The wet and dry process of milk powder and their advantages and disadvantages were introduced. So, how to distinguish the process used in the finished milk powder? Here I want to remind you that you can distinguish it from the ingredient list of milk powder packaging: if the first item of the ingredient list is "raw sheep (cow) milk" and "fresh sheep milk", it is a wet process; if it is "full milk powder, skimmed milk powder or skimmed milk powder", it is a dry process or a dry-wet mixing process.
3. Dry-wet Composite Technology
Dry-wet composite technology refers to the process of fresh milk by using both dry-mixing and wet-mixing technology. Milk powder can be produced by the wet mixing process. Its milk company is close to the requirement of milk sources. It can ensure that fresh milk is floured once, and can quickly become the smallest package for sale. Reduce the pollution of intermediate links, ensure the freshness of milk powder, add nutrients directly into fresh milk to make the nutritional mixing more uniform, while some heat-sensitive nutrients (vitamins, probiotics) are added in the dry mixing stage to ensure its activity. This process is superior to wet mixing or dry mixing.