In the powdered coffee industry spray drying of coffee extract is a widely
used drying method which is considered as the most economical drying technique
however due to the process conditions often much aroma's are lost.
It
has been proven in practice that when a high quality extract is fed into a
spray dryer at high concentration, the aroma retention is improved. By using
split or double extraction the first extract contains most of the aromas from
the coffee extract.
Concentrating this first extract with
freeze concentration retains all of these valuable components in the FC
concentrate. The remaining extractions increase the yield but contain little
aroma and can be easily concentrated by evaporation. Combining these two
concentrated streams improves the quality of the spray dried product.
Learn more about spray drying and spray dryer technology from our sister
company GEA Niro here.
The concept of freeze concentration is explained in the chapter "Technologies" and "Documentation"