Spray drying remains a cornerstone technology in the UK food and feed industries. It enables manufacturers to transform complex liquid formulations into high value, shelf stable powders with consistent performance at scale. From functional ingredients and flavour systems to dairy powders, plant-based proteins, and specialist feed products, spray drying supports efficiency, quality, and product reliability. These factors are critical in today’s competitive and highly regulated markets.
As innovation timelines compress and commercial pressures increase, organisations are placing greater emphasis on making informed and lower risk development decisions. In this environment, access to pilot scale spray drying is increasingly recognised as a strategic advantage. It allows companies to validate new product concepts, optimise formulations, and refine process parameters before committing to full scale manufacture. This reduces technical risk, cost, and time to market.
Why Spray Drying Matters in Food and Feed Manufacturing
The adaptability of spray drying underpins its widespread use across food and feed applications.
In food and nutrition, it plays a vital role in the production of milk powders, protein isolates, flavours, probiotics, and functional ingredients. Rapid and controlled drying helps protect nutritional integrity, stabilise sensitive components, and deliver consistent powder characteristics. These characteristics influence solubility, shelf life, and sensory performance.
In feed production, spray drying supports the manufacture of high-performance nutritional products and additives. Uniformity, bioavailability, and stability are essential for both efficacy and regulatory compliance.
Across both sectors, the ability to engineer powders with predictable morphology, moisture content, and functional behaviour is fundamental to ensuring downstream processing efficiency and consistent product quality.
Reducing Scale Up Risk Through Pilot Scale Capability
One of the most significant challenges in product development is translating laboratory success into reliable commercial production. Differences in drying kinetics, particle formation, and thermal exposure can introduce unexpected issues when processes are scaled.
Pilot scale spray drying provides a critical bridge between research and manufacturing by generating commercially relevant process data. This supports more confident scale up decisions, informs equipment selection, and strengthens business cases for investment. It also allows emerging opportunities, including clean label reformulation, functional and fortified products, sustainable ingredients, and novel protein sources, to be explored without disrupting existing production lines.
Bridging Innovation and Commercial Reality
This is where AberInnovation plays an important role. By providing industry access to advanced food and feed processing facilities, including pilot scale (litres to kilograms) spray drying technologies to agglomeration, AberInnovation enables businesses to progress from concept to market ready product with greater confidence.
Its applied research environment helps companies test and refine processes under realistic operating conditions. This accelerates development timelines while reducing technical and commercial uncertainty. The result is faster innovation, stronger decision making, and improved readiness for scale.
With the right pilot scale infrastructure and expertise in place, companies can de-risk development, respond more effectively to market demands, and bring better food and feed products to market.
AberInnovation is helping to make that transition from innovation to impact possible.
Our excellent set up is thanks to world-leading supplier of innovative Industrial Research & Development equipment for food, beverage and pharmaceutical industries – Armfield Engineering.
