What ad­just­ments will you make?

Si­mone: We will re­assess all of our for­mu­la­tion com­po­nents. We will adapt the vi­t­a­min and min­eral con­tent to the new law, for ex­am­ple, and slightly re­duce  the pro­tein con­tent. We are also striv­ing to ­further im­prove the sen­sory qual­i­ties as well as  the taste and pow­der struc­ture. We will make the ­adjustments that we have been able to un­der­take al­ready in many coun­tries out­side the EU

How do you go about mak­ing ad­just­ments?

Si­mone: The first thing we do is to eval­u­ate the ­quality of the raw ma­te­ri­als and the sup­pli­ers. At the same time, we asses all the analy­sis re­sults of our pre­vi­ous for­mu­la­tions, agree on the po­ten­tial for im­prove­ment and work out for­mu­la­tions. We do all that from our desk in the of­fice. After the raw ma­te­r­ial se­lec­tion, we start with the lab tests. We analyse the pow­der struc­ture, the heat sta­bil­ity or the nu­tri­tional val­ues, for in­stance. If the re­sults meet our qual­ity ­criteria, we carry out our first small pilot test in the spray tower. With the pow­der we pro­duce, we can carry out stor­age tests and then com­pare dif­fer­ent for­mu­la­tions to de­fine the op­ti­mum com­po­si­tion and the pro­duc­tion pa­ra­me­ters for spray dry­ing. A test pro­duc­tion on the final pro­duc­tion fa­cil­ity, known as a “scale up” is al­ways nec­es­sary be­cause the pro­duction pa­ra­me­ters for test and pro­duc­tion spray tow­ers vary greatly in re­al­ity. This pow­der is again analysed when it is freshly pro­duced and through­out its shelf life, be­fore we re­lease the for­mu­la­tion for sales. 

Si­mone Har­tong, thank you for this ex­cit­ing in­sight.

Fur­ther In­for­ma­tion

• Ar­ti­cle "Omega-3 fatty acid DHA in in­fant nu­tri­tion"
• Overview  "In­ter­est­ing facts about our brain"