Texturized Vegetable Protein (TVP) are products that have been transformed from a flour-type material into a meat-like texture. The resulting vegetable protein provides the chewiness and fibrous character to amongst others meat alternatives.
TVP’s can be defined as ‘food products’ made from edible protein sources and characterized by having structural integrity and identifiable texture. Preprocessing, TVP’s have to be carefully hydrated. Up until now, TVP hydration is mostly executed in batch processes resulting in scalability issues, increased manual labor and product quality inconsistency.
AUTOMATION & PROCESS CONTROL
Most recent studies show another increase in total sales of plant-based meat products. As a result, alternative protein producers are looking to further automate and control their production processes more than ever. Automation and process control allows producers to significantly lower their operational cost. This strongly contributed to the observed increase in continuous (food) production demand.
CONTINUOUS TVP HYDRATION
As a specialist in continuous and automated (food) production processes, Sobatech developed a continuous TVP hydration system aiding to the commercialization of a fully automated and continuous plant-based foods production process. The process may consist out of (1) the continuous TVP hydration, (2) continuous emulsion preparation and finally (3) homogenizing of the final mix.
By bringing the continuous TVP hydrater to market, Sobatech delivers a full solution from the continuous weighing of the separate ingredients up and including producing the final mass.
The continuous TVP hydration system offers an ideal solution to hydrate voluminous masses over time. One and the same system can handle a wide variety of different TVP types and textures. Inside the hydrater, TVP’s are humidified in an equal and consistent manner without destroying its structures. This results in an equally moisturized TVP that is lump-free and ready to be further processed.
