Food ingredients and blends

Food and ingredient powders vary enormously – in particle size, fat content, moisture sensitivity, shape and surface chemistry. Sugar behaves differently to starch; dried dairy behaves differently to protein blends; hydrocolloid systems are different again. What they have in common is that behaviour during filling, conveying, storage and discharge is rarely predictable from appearance alone.

High-speed production lines amplify even small differences in powder behaviour. Variable fill weights, segregation during conveying, caking after storage, or erratic discharge from hoppers – these problems may not appear during bench-scale testing but emerge at line speed or after a humid transit. Dynamic powder testing with the Powder Flow Analyser captures these effects directly, because it measures powders under the kind of movement and stress they actually experience. Texture Analyser tests complement this by measuring the mechanical strength of any cakes or agglomerates that form.

View examples of published work: 

Ready-to-use powdered dessert, wheatflour, soup concentrates, sweet powder powders and coffee powders.

• Granulated sugar shows moderate cohesion but strong rate sensitivity (1.56): its compaction behaviour changes substantially as speed increases, and its Flow Stability (1.94) indicates that behaviour shifts across repeated fill cycles. For a high-speed packing line, this means fill weights that drift over a production run – not because the sugar itself has changed, but because the powder column progressively consolidates. Its caking height ratio (0.75) also indicates meaningful cake formation under storage conditions.
• Icing sugar is more cohesive at rest than granulated sugar, but its speed ratio (0.32) shows the opposite trend – it becomes substantially easier to move at higher speeds rather than harder. The risk here is less about starving a feeder and more about over-feeding or surging when line speeds increase, because the powder offers less resistance than expected.
• Xanthan – Locust bean gum shows a different profile again: moderate cohesion, low dynamic resistance (low compaction coefficient at 10 mm/s), and minimal cake formation. Its behaviour story is about structure and packing sensitivity rather than dynamic resistance – and its water sensitivity means that test conditions and environment need controlling carefully to get reproducible results.

Powder Flow Analyser – Dynamic behaviour

Texture Analyser – Strength and failure

Powder problems are driven by movement, stress, and time. Dynamic flow and strength-based testing reveal behaviours that static tests cannot capture.