Plant-Based Milks

There’s growing consumer demand for plant-based dairy alternatives. Individual reasons vary, but they often tie into ideas of; nutrition, health & wellness, sustainability, animal welfare, and allergen awareness.

While the end products are used as dairy alternatives, plant-based processes do come with challenges you don’t find in dairy-based milk. The product requires gentle care and best process design, especially through the heat steps.

Typical Process Steps

• Dry mill / Wet mill: Your raw ingredients are incorporated into a slurry via a dry mill / wet mill process.
• Enzyme and Heat treatment (if required): With a starchy product like oats, an enzyme treatment is needed to reduce viscosity and, break down the starch into sugars for natural sweetness. The enzyme must then be deactivated via heat treatment.
• Separation: A decanter centrifuge is needed to process the slurry to remove insoluble fibre and larger particulates to your recipe to promote a velvety smooth mouth-feel.
• Formulation: Additional components/flavours/stabilisers can be mixed. This will likely include vitamins and minerals to increase the nutritional value, and will include some form of oil to add fat content. This helps to replicate the creamy mouthfeel you find in dairy.
• Heat Treatment: Similar to dairy, the plant milk undergoes pasteurisation or UHT to extend shelf life.
• Homogenisation: Plant-based milks have a larger particle size compared to dairy, homogenisation reduces the size of these particles (and distributes the oil/fat content) to improve the mouthfeel.
• Cooling: We’ll design either a heat exchange system, or in-tank cooling, designed to cool your product to your exact requirements.
• Filling/packaging: Depending on your product, we supply a wide range of fillers/packaging machines specifically built to cater to your product requirements. Options range from entry-level fillers, right through to fully automatic machines capable of high-volume throughput.