Evolution and Impact of Food Extrusion Technology

The foundation of food extrusion lies in the snack and ready-to-eat breakfast cereal industries. Historically, the first application of a cooking extruder in the food industry occurred in the mid-1940s, producing an expanded cornmeal-based snack using a single screw extruder. This snack was most likely an expanded yellow cornmeal ball or curl coated with seasoning such as cheese and salt, resembling products still available from many snack producers today.

Currently, single screw extruders are more prevalent in the food industry than twin screw extruders, mainly because they have been in use longer. Single screw extruders made their debut in the 1940s, while twin screw extruders were not developed for the food industry until the early 1980s. However, twin screw extruders are rapidly becoming the preferred choice due to their greater versatility.

Twin screw extruders offer several advantages over single screw extruders. They are more adept at handling variations in raw materials that occur year by year and from crop to crop, making them ideal for processing complex formulas with difficult ingredients. Additionally, they provide superior conveying and pumping abilities and better heat transfer. These capabilities make twin screw extruders more efficient and adaptable, which is critical in today's fast-evolving food industry.

In the mid-1970s, there were probably only four suppliers of food extruders, all producing single screw extruders. These machines were primarily used to produce snacks, ready-to-eat breakfast cereals, and textured vegetable proteins. By the late 1990s, the number of food extruder suppliers had increased to at least ten, reflecting the growing demand for these machines and the expanding variety of extruded food products.

Today, the food extrusion industry continues to innovate, driven by consumer demand for diverse and convenient food options. Extrusion technology has advanced significantly, offering improved efficiency, product quality, and versatility. As the food industry evolves, extrusion technology will likely play an increasingly vital role in meeting the challenges of food production and satisfying consumer preferences.
Evolution and Impact of Food Extrusion Technology

History of shredded wheat

Sometime in the early 1890’s, at a Nebraska hotel, Henry Perky — who suffered from heartburn— had encountered a man similarly afflicted, who was eating boiled wheat with cream.

The idea had cooked for a while in Perky’s mind, and in 1892 he had taken his idea of a product made of boiled wheat to Watertown, NY, where his friend William H. Ford, a machinist by trade, helped Perky build the device that he had conceived.

Henry Perky introduced his newly-built machine for making shredded wheat at the 1893 World’s Fair; the shredded wheat was described as “Tasting like a shredded door mat”. Perky had developed a process for making these things, and in 1895, Mr. Perky and William Ford were issued utility patents for their “Machine for the Preparation of Cereals for Food” (U.S. Patent No. 502,378, August 1, 1893), the first of dozens of patents that Perky would eventually receive in connection with the production of shredded wheat.

Perky’s business plan was to sell the machines and not the cereal. But the biscuits proved more popular than the machines.

In 1895 in Denver, Perky founded the Cereal Machine Company. He began distributing the shredded-wheat biscuits from a horse-drawn wagon in an attempt to popularize the idea. But the biscuits proved more popular than the machines themselves. So, Perky moved East and opened his first bakery in Boston, Massachusetts, and then in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1895. He retained the name of The Cereal Machine Company, and adding the name of the Shredded Wheat Company.

Perky was a pioneer of the “cookless breakfast food”, and it was he who first mass-produced and nationally distributed ready-to-eat cereal. By 1898, Shredded Wheat was being sold all over North and South America and Europe.

By 1901, he had set up an ultra-modern plant at Niagara Falls to make shredded wheat, and the falls became the familiar logo of the cereal, which continues as a Nabisco product. Edward A. Deeds, an electrical engineer became a director of the National Food Company, the new name Perky had adopted for his enterprises that produced Shredded Wheat and related products, such as Triscuits crackers.

In 1908, the company again took the name of The Shredded Wheat Company, and another factory was built in Niagara Falls, N.Y.
History of shredded wheat

Early history of breakfast cereal

The word “cereal” comes from the name Ceres, the ancient Roman goddess of the harvest. Cereals have been people’s basic food since Neolithic times, following the birth of agriculture, which initially focused on the cultivation of wild grains.

Around 7000 B.C the first cereals (wheat & barley) are cultivated in the Middle East.

Breakfast cereal, a food made from grain, commonly eaten in the morning. The oldest type of cereal, known as porridge or gruel, requires cooking in water or milk. Eating breakfast began in the Neolithic (late Stone Age) era, when large stones were used to grind grains to make a sort of porridge. Porridge was also a staple of Roman Soldiers’ diets – they called it pulmentus.

They are called processed foods because they go through several processes to turn them into breakfast cereal.

During the middle ages, barley and hops were used to make beer which was served up in the morning to hungry peasants alongside oatcakes or porridge.

A porridge called samp had been eaten by New England colonists since shortly after they arrived in America. It was described by Native American language scholar Roger Williams as ‘the Indian corne, beaten and boiled and eaten hot or cold with milk or butter, which are mercies beyond the Native plaine water and which is a dish exceedingly wholesome for the English bodies’.

During the American Civil War, Union soldiers were glad to get a hot breakfast cereal, especially when they were in the march or cut off from supply trains.

Cooks used foodstuff on hand to make, panada, a hot breakfast gruel affectionately known as ‘bully soup,’ which the main ingredients were watery corn meal and crumbled hardtack, both of which were standard issue.

Another cornmeal porridge can be made by boiling stale cornbread. Cush-cush is a Louisiana dish that was standard camp fare for Confederate soldiers during civil war.

The original motivation for the development of precooked breakfast foods seems to have been the desire of some vegetarian to add more variety to their diets.

Health food movement emerged in the nineteenth century United States, in a particular among followers of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church which emphasized a vegetarian lifestyle.

At that time most Americans did not consume enough dietary fiber and many suffered from digestive disorders as a result.
Early history of breakfast cereal

History of flour milling in United States Part I

One of the early mill, gristmills, such as the one at Jamestown in 1621, ground corn and wheat for meal and flour help to feed the colonist while making the millers key local figures.

The vast majority of mills up to about 1800, operated as custom mills that ground the farmer’s grain for a toll in flour paid to the miller.

In the late eighteenth century Oliver Evans invented labor-saving machinery which greatly increased the productivity of flour mills.

Eastern mills that had relied on soft wheat felt competition from larger western millers based in Minneapolis and other Midwestern cities that used new machinery to grind the hard wheat that predominated in the Midwest.

As the population moved westward and grain production increased, four milling became an important industry.

As early as 1850, flour milling accounted for almost 10 percent of all industrial establishments an over 13 percent of the value of all industrial products. The milling industry became increasingly centralized.

In themed 1800s there were an estimated 25,000 mills in America; by 1900 there were only 13,000 mills, by 2000 there were a mere 1oo flour milling companies.

With an expanding rail system, flour milling could be concentrated and product shipped to markets throughout the country. By the end of the nineteenth century, American and Canadian flour exports to Britain had grown steadily.

Baltimore was the early leader in flour milling, developing a flour trade with the South, Latin America, and Europe, while Rochester and Buffalo growing in stature after completion of the Erie Canal.

The most important western milling town was St. Luis. This city with its fine river and rail transportation facilities captured markets for flour in the South and the East.
History of flour milling in United States

Cereal Processing: History of Milling

The objective of cereal milling is to remove the bran and germ from the seed and to free the endosperm.

This left whole as in rice milling, ground into coarse pieces (wheat semolina, maize grits) or milled into flour.

Since prehistoric times up to the middle of the 19th century, cereal grains were ground in small mills, driven by hand, wind or water power.

The process of milling wheat into flour was revolutionized around 800 BC in Mesopotamia, when animal, water and wind power were harnessed for the first time to run the large stones used for grinding.

In ancient Rome the mill and the bakery were the very same enterprise. The grain were milled and worked up without delay to dough and bread.

The flour ground in such a mill was whole grain flour, because the complete cereal grains poured into the mill on top, came out out as flour at the bottom.

Probably the most ancient technique involves the grinder rocking backwards and forwards while grasping an ellipsoid stone in both hands which crushes the grain within a larger concave stone suits in front of the grinder.

Both upper and lower stone are usually made from a hard igneous rock such as granite or basalt to avoid the production of stone in the grinding process.

Around the Mediterranean and possibly also in China during the first half of the first millennium BC, there were two sophisticated versions of the handmill the hopper-rubber and the lever mill.

Moving to the milling process proper, it was in 1878 that Henry Simon took 19 British millers, to Hungary to view the all steel rollermill invention.

This machine became the heart of what is known as the gradual reduction system, commonly used worldwide today.
Cereal Processing: History of Milling