Advanced dairy analysis: Key highlights from our webinar

Whether they’re making milk powder or plant-based alternatives, any producer of dairy-like products needs to ensure safety, quality, and regulatory compliance. Failing to do this not only jeopardizes consumers’ health and safety, but also dairy companies’ license to operate.

This makes it crucial to analyze parameters such as particle size, fat content, protein levels, and mineral composition – and Malvern Panalytical offers multiple solutions to support this, across laser diffraction, NIR spectroscopy, and XRF technologies.

We explored a few of these solutions in our past webinar with Steve Ward-Smith and Paul Senior – part of our series on advanced technologies in food and dairy! Here’s a recap of what we discussed:

Key takeaways

• NIR and XRF are critical tools for dairy quality control – characterizing parameters like fat, protein, lactose, moisture, sugar, and pH levels.
• Ensuring stability is a key challenge in plant-based dairy alternatives. Zeta potential measurements can help producers optimize their formulations to enhance the shelf life of these products.
• Many dairy products and their derivatives have complex components such as whey protein, maltodextrins and hydrocolloids. Malvern Panalytical’s OMNISEC system allows producers to perform multi-detector analysis on these components, ensuring ingredient consistency.

Over the last few years, the milk replacement market has massively increased. The particle sizes of these replacements are generally a little bit bigger than the real thing, so you often have to add a stabilizer.

Quality control for existing and emerging dairy-market products

Steve started the webinar by pointing out that a lot of today’s dairy-market products aren’t actually dairy at all! With vegan diets increasingly common, plant-based dairy alternatives are fast growing in popularity. On the other hand, whey – which for years was treated as a waste product or fed back to cows – is increasingly being used as an ingredient in highprotein human food products.

With these new products, Malvern Panalytical has a key role to play in quality control – especially if multiple instruments are used at once. For instance, the Zetasizer can be used to measure and optimize stability, while XRF or NIR can come in to identify elements. This is particularly useful when fortifying products. Of course, this kind of quality control remains as crucial as ever in ensuring the safety of traditional milk products – particularly those like milk powder which are fed to infants.

Ensuring stability for plant-based alternatives

One issue with emerging plant-based milk alternatives is stability. The zeta potential in most milk substitutes is typically lower than those in cow’s milk – which means lower stability. As such, manufacturers of these milk alternatives often have to add stabilizers such as xanthan gum.

Monitoring zeta potential with tools like the Zetasizer (for the plant-based milk itself) and OMNISEC (for the hydrocolloid stabilizers) allows manufacturers to add the right amounts of these stabilizers – for the ideal balance between creaminess and stability. They can even use these measurements to destabilize a product – making its particles agglomerate to turn it into a plant-based cheese alternative.

A customer came to us with three different sources of maltodextrin that were all supposed to be the same, but were all behaving very differently. We identified significant structural differences between the three systems, even though the intrinsic viscosity was the same.

Comprehensive characterization for maltodextrin

In fact, material characterization also plays an important role when the dairy product itself is the additive – such as with the addition of whey-based maltodextrin to sports drinks, protein shakes, and energy bars. Maltodextrin is typically bought based on its bulk viscosity – but other properties can significantly affect how it behaves. This means that samples advertised as the same product can work very differently in practice.

By analyzing maltodextrin using tools such as OMNISEC, Malvern Panalytical can help to identify these ‘hidden differences’ in structure and molecular weight – so that manufacturers can choose the option that’s best for their goals.

As the dairy industry continues to evolve, these technologies will only become more important – helping manufacturers to meet regulatory standards, maintain quality and safety for consumers, and develop further innovative formulations.

Curious? You can watch the webinar recording here – and why not register for one of the remaining ones in the series?