Development of Extruder in Food Industry

Development of Extruder in Food Industry
The foundation of food extrusion lies in the snack and ready to eat breakfast cereal industries. History shows that the first application of the use of a cooking extruder in the food industry was in producing an expanded cornmeal based snack in the mid 1940s on a single screw extruder.

Mostly likely, this was either an expanded yellow cornmeal ball or curl that was then coated with some type of seasoning such as cheese and salt.

This is very similar to some of the products still offered by today by many snack producers.

Currently, there are more single than twin screw extruders in use in the food industry. The main reason for this is that they have been around longer than twin screw extruders.

Single-screw extruder were first used in the 1940s, which twin screw extruders were not developed for the food industry until the early 1980s.

However, twin-screw extruders are rapidly becoming the extruders of choice in the food industry.

Basically the fact is that twin-screw extruders have more versatility than single screw extruders.

They have a greater affinity to overcome year by year and crop to crop differences in raw materials, are better suited to extrude complex formula with “difficult” ingredients, have better conveying/pumping ability, and have better heat transfer.

In the mid 1970s, there were probably only four suppliers of food extruders, and at that time, those were only single-screw extruders.

Most of these extruders were used to produce snacks, ready to eat breakfast cereals, and textured vegetables proteins. By the late 1990s, there were at least ten suppliers of food extruders.
Development of Extruder in Food Industry

History of Pasta Processing

Pasta is a generic term used in reference to the whole range of products commonly known as spaghetti, macaroni and noodles.

When the humans discovered agriculture, they also invented bread and pasta. Actually, pasta is a kind of “bread” made by flour and water. Opposite bread, pasta is a flat strips or small squares.
Italy is generally regarded as the home of pasta products. In the fifteenth century, Italians learned how to make noodles from the Germans, who had previously learned the process in their travels to Asia.

In the 1500s dry pasta manufacturers were founded all over the Italy. The dough was mixed by foot and compressed by 3-4 workers sitting on a long wooden pool. The dough was presses into bronze plate as vermicelli, trennette, lasagnette, farfalle, pennette, conchiglie and other pasta forms, still known today.

The short forms were kept in drawers while the long forms were dried in the open.

The first mechanical devices for pasta manufacturing were invented in the 1800s. Around 1850, the first hand-operated pasta press was built. By 1860 more elaborated presses had been had been made. By increasing the popularity of pasta it required more efficient production process to be developed.

By early 1900s, mixers, kneaders, hydraulic piston type extrusion presses and drying cabinets were available for batch manufacturing of pasta.

In 1933, the first continuous single screw using low temperature drying profiles that mimicked open air drying conditions typical of the region around Naples, Italy. It replacing the batch system.

Extruder was developed by Joseph Bramah, in England in 1797 before applied to pasta processing.

It required 18 to 20 hours to dry pasta when using a low temperature drying profile. High temperature drying (60 to 80 degree C) of pasta was introduced in 1974 and ultra high temperature (80 to 100 degree C) drying was introduced in the late 1980s.

Drying at high or ultrahigh temperatures has reduced drying time of long goods (e.g., spaghetti) to about 10 and 6 hours, respectively.

Today, pasta manufacturing is totally automated with pasta presses capable of producing spaghetti at 3,500 kg/h and macaroni at 8,000 kg/h.

History of Pasta Processing