By now you may have heard about the Caloris Low-Spore Powder Process for producing milk powders. So what’s all the fuss about?

Let’s say you have a milk powder production facility and you want to produce the highest-quality milk powder possible. You have one little (microscopic, even) problem — spores. All raw milk has a low level of bacterial spores in it when it reaches a production facility. In these original, low numbers, the spores do not pose a problem. But when the milk is heated, the warmth can encourage the spores to reproduce. Heat is an essential part of the process when producing milk powder. So what to do?

There is a series of steps taken to process fluid milk into milk powder and several types of equipment make up that process, including evaporators and dryers. It turns out the environment in the evaporator system is conducive to the formation of biofilms, which encourage spore growth. There is a tipping point after 10 hours of processing in the evaporator system when biofilms form and spore counts tend to mushroom (ahem) to unacceptable levels, leading to contaminated milk powder.

Superior Process Technology

One of the keys to the Caloris Low-Spore Powder Process is well-timed cleaning of the equipment, to prevent this level of unacceptable spore growth. Taking equipment offline in order to clean it can interrupt powder production, however. Caloris has developed a patent-pending, and now award-winning, low-spore powder production configuration of the equipment that allows for cleaning to occur without stopping the entire production process.

Recently, the Caloris Low-Spore Powder Process was implemented at the Lone Star Dairy Products facility in Canyon, Texas. The new plant has continuous, uninterrupted production of high-quality, low-spore milk powders. This implementation won the 2018 ADPI Breakthrough Award at last month’s American Dairy Products Institute Annual Conference.

If the Caloris Low-Spore Process is of interest to you, please give us a call at 410-822-6900 or send email to problem.solved@caloris.com.