Drying of Probiotics

Probiotics act as living cells to exert a probiotic effect. Therefore, it is a challenge to avoid cell disruption and to remove water during the drying of probiotics. Proper drying techniques and ensuring the viability of probiotics are the key points to dry probiotics. Creative Enzymes offers a wide range of technologies for probiotic drying and provides clients with stable, viable probiotic products through a combination of drying technologies and process optimization.

Introduction of Probiotic Drying

As part of functional foods, probiotics are becoming increasingly popular for their health benefits. However, maintaining viability during storage is a challenge. The viability of probiotics is often affected by environmental conditions and biochemical changes during storage and digestion. Drying probiotics into powder form has several benefits, such as.

• Easy to handle.
• Improve stability.
• Maintaining cellular viability.

Creative Enzymes offers our clients a variety of advanced probiotic drying technologies combined with traditional processes to form a multi-stage, gentle drying process to reduce the damage to probiotic viability during the drying process by traditional methods.

Fig. 1 Essential factors affecting powder properties and probiotic survival during probiotic powder production and storage. (Ermis, 2022)

Our Drying Methods

• Freeze-Drying

Freeze-drying is a common drying technique to protect the viability of probiotics. In the Creative Enzymes' lab, our scientists have enabled long-term storage and low-cost distribution of probiotics at sub-zero temperatures while minimizing loss of viability and function by reducing water activity to below 0.2. Our approach mainly consists of the following three steps.

• Spray Drying

Spray drying offers a drying method that allows for larger production scale, lower energy costs and a sustainable process. In the course of this drying method, we spray the liquid feed in fine droplets (10-150 μm) which are guided into the hot and drying air stream (typically 150°C-250°C). The increased air-liquid interface area after spraying greatly increases the drying kinetics, allowing the drying process to be completed in a very short time. The advantages of this technique are being cost-effective, simple, continuous, and providing rapid drying with controlled particle size.

• Vacuum Drying

Vacuum drying is a potential alternative method. Vacuum drying can reduce the drying temperature under vacuum, increase the drying speed and reduce the oxygen concentration. Compared with the traditional hot air-drying method, vacuum drying can better preserve cell viability.

• Fluidized Bed Drying

Fluidized bed drying is a convection type drying technology. In this method, hot air with controlled speed and temperature is applied to the drying belt or chamber in an upward direction so that the raw material reaches a fluidized state during the drying process.

• Electrohydrodynamic Drying

Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) drying of probiotics using ionic air is a novel drying method. The EHD drying process depends on parameters such as polarity and voltage of the electric field, type of collector, surrounding temperature and gas, and excipients used. Creative enzymes better promote airflow, water evaporation rates and cell viability during EDH treatment by using a moving mesh planar electrode collector.

Advantages of Creative Enzymes

• Our scientists are well aware of the advantages and disadvantages of various drying technologies and can choose the appropriate drying technology to maximize the viability of probiotics according to the needs of our customers' products.
• Multiple combinations of drying technologies can be used to reduce drying time and increase drying efficiency.
• We optimized the drying conditions to overcome the problem of viability loss during drying.

Creative Enzymes is a professional and experienced probiotic supplier and service provider. We are committed to using our technology to provide state-of-the-art solutions to our clients for probiotic drying. To get more information, please contact us and we will be happy to serve your research demands.

Reference

1. Ermis, E. A review of drying methods for improving the quality of probiotic powders and characterization. Drying Technology. 2022, 40(11): 2199-2216.