A SUPPLEMENT TO. Innovative Ingredients, Versatile Applications

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1 A SUPPLEMENT TO Innovative Ingredients, Versatile Applications

2 Gentle Drying Makes for Robust Ingredients New drying technology yields pure, more nutritious fruit and vegetable ingredients. ALL DRIED FRUITS and vegetables are not created equal. The most common drying processes, which include freeze drying, drum drying, and infusion with sugar or other substances, all result in significant differences in appearance, flavor, mouthfeel and other aspects of product quality. There are high stakes for food processors to get it right. Recent consumer preferences and trends relating to nutritional value and a clean, natural ingredient label have increased the potential applications for dried fruits and vegetables, ranging from powders to large chunks with varying moisture levels. An innovative new drying method that, compared with other processes, was developed relatively recently, is changing the game. This method has the potential to furnish ingredients with more nutritional value, a wider range of product attributes and more general versatility than ever before. Milne MicroDried, a division of Wyckoff Farms, uses a drying technology known as radiant energy vacuum (REV). It applies microwave energy to bulk-solid foods inside a vacuum, allowing more control over moisture, water activity, particle structure and other crucial aspects of ingredient quality than any other drying method. REV was developed by a researcher at the University of British Columbia more than 20 years ago, who went on to found EnWave Corp., which supplies the equipment and technical know-how. MicroDried, established in 2012, is the first user to commercialize EnWave s technology successfully. Clean, natural fruit and vegetable ingredients are available in different sizes, shapes and powders. S-2 A supplement to Food Processing magazine

3 Broadly speaking, the great advantage of the REV process, as used by MicroDried, is that it results in ingredients that are 100 percent pure. They are simply healthier than many traditional options and produce better, more nutritious consumer products, with natural fiber, protein and antioxidants. All MicroDried products offer a clean, single ingredient label with no added sugars, color, preservatives or additives of any kind. The healthy ingredients use the whole fruit and vegetable, including skin and seeds, to maximize antioxidants and phytonutrients. Using the whole fruit increases the flavor and nutritional value of MicroDried ingredients. MicroDried offers ingredients made from more than 20 different types of fruits and vegetables, including blueberries, strawberries, cherries, mangoes, carrots, lentils and more. It can furnish ingredients in a wide range of particulate sizes: fine and coarse powders, and pieces in practically any size, from less than 1mm to more than 5mm. Many MicroDried ingredients, including blueberries (the first product to be dried using REV), are available as whole pieces. Others are available as powders and fragments with and without fines. The MicroDried process can set moisture according to the demands of an individual end-user application. Produced with no added sugar, color or preservatives, the ingredients are modified to customer specifications by piece size, variable moisture levels and water activity. Whole pieces and fragments are available in chewy and crunchy textures. Two or more fruit and vegetable varieties can be blended to create trendy new tastes and colors, or compounded with sweetening or flowability agents as part of the customization process. The process starts with individually quick frozen fruits and vegetables. In comparison with fresh, starting with IQF product gives more control over microbial loads and general quality. The product first goes into an oven that drives out much of the moisture. Then it enters a vacuum chamber. The vacuum lowers the boiling point of the remaining moisture, allowing it to be gently expelled by microwaves. By controlling the vacuum and the microwave energy level, MicroDried can vary the amount of the moisture in the final product, matching it to the needs of the end user s application. The use of microwaves ensures that the final drying is done with as little heat as possible, which preserves the product s integrity and improves flavor and overall quality. The microwave is applied to the product as it enters the vacuum chamber as a very efficient and homogeneous way of removing the water, unlike air-drying and freeze-drying, says Brent Charleton, EnWave s Senior Vice President for Business Development. Both of those technologies dry the product from the outside to the center freeze-drying through sublimation, and Drying fruit and vegetables in a vacuum produces larger whole and fragmented pieces with more color than infused and freeze drying. S-3

4 air-drying through hot air blowing over it. When you use microwave energy under vacuum, you re drying the product evenly, from the core to the outside. The moisture can go down to four percent or less of the product s original moisture content, giving the end user the widest possible range of moisture for any given application. EnWave s deep knowledge of the processing parameters, passed on to MicroDried, allows the moisture and other quality aspects to be fine-tuned, Charleton says. And in four years of prototyping and production runs, MicroDried has fine-tuned the process and become expert at delivering to customers the exact particle size and moisture level specified even mixtures of different berries, if desired. This technology gives the user the ability to produce a wide variety of product specifications for our customers, Steve Nugent, Director of IQF, Dried and Export Sales for Milne, explains. It s the processing parameter know-how understanding how much energy needs to be introduced under a certain level of vacuum, which will remove X amount of water. Based on some complex calculations, we can determine how much energy needs to be applied to achieve the targeted moisture content. This degree of precision confers a number of advantages over infusion drying and freeze drying, the two primary methods used to dry fruit, says Heidi Farkas, MicroDried s National Sales and Marketing Manager. We don t add any other ingredients, while infusion drying means soaking it in a medium like sugar or juice and then drying it, Farkas says. Our products have a very clean ingredient list it s just the fruit. That s not the only advantage. When you compare MicroDried ingredients against freezedried ones, you find a number of advantages, one of them being the color of the fruit, Farkas says. The inside of a freeze-dried blueberry, for example, tends to be white or pink a Micro- Dried blueberry will be blue all the way through. This color uniformity is especially important if the fruit is going to be reduced to very small pieces or a powder. MicroDried products are sturdy and have better particle integrity than those dried by competing methods. Particle integrity confers another important advantage: In many applications, it makes MicroDried ingredients significantly easier for the end user to blend. Color uniformity is important in slices, wedges and fragments. S-4 A supplement to Food Processing magazine

5 MicroDried s significantly reduced microbial load has important implications for food safety, especially in dairy applications like ice cream and yogurt. One of the areas in which we really see success is in our ability to blend the products, says Nugent. The products are not fragile. Because of that, we can deliver to our customer a blended product, so it s a one-step addition for them. Because the finished product is so sturdy, we have the ability to size and dice whole pieces into whatever size the customer wants, Nugent says. Freeze-dried particles are too fragile and infusion-dried ones too sticky to reduce in size reliably, he says. Another MicroDried advantage lies in its significantly reduced microbial load. MicroDried products typically have an aerobic plate count of less than 5,000 cfu/g, less than half of the usual levels of fruit dried by other methods. This has important implications for food safety, especially in dairy applications like ice cream and yogurt. But perhaps the most striking difference between MicroDried ingredients and those dried by other methods are two of the most important aspects of food in general: nutrition and taste. The process preserves most of the natural vitamins, minerals and other nutrients in the fruit and vegetables while retaining superior flavor, texture and color. These advantages even extend to MicroDried products in powder form. Unlike spray-drying, a common conventional way to render fruits and vegetables into powders, the MicroDried process starts with whole pieces of fruit or other produce. It processes them at a significantly lower temperature than drum dryers, which can operate up to 350 F. If you re looking at something like a strawberry, with fragile color, you can overcook it, and it really hurts the color on a spray-dried or a drum-dried product, Nugent says. That s a lot of heat to put into a strawberry. You ll get a lot of browning. Another alternative for producing powders, freeze-drying and then milling, also has disadvantages with regard to color. When you freeze-dry a blueberry, or a cranberry, or a strawberry, there s a lot of white in that fruit, Nugent says. So when you make powder out of it, you re taking the red from the skin and you re milling it up, and all of the white the fiber of the blueberry or the strawberry offsets that red and will give you more of a pink hue, as opposed to the rich color found in MicroDried products. When we run it through that microwave vacuum, it actually holds the color throughout the whole product, so that product is no longer white inside, it s the natural color, he continues. So when you mill it, you ll get a much more vibrant blue from the blueberry or a more vibrant red for a cranberry than you will from a freeze-dried product. The color integrity means that MicroDried powders can even be used as colorants which helps keep a product s ingredient list all-natural. The high quality, versatility and adjustability of the MicroDried process means that Micro- Dried ingredients are being used in an enormous range of applications everything from breakfast cereal to jerky, even beer. We ve had success across every segment of the food & beverage industry, Farkas says. We ve only scratched the surface of new applications for MicroDried fruits and vegetables. As we complete the expansion of the plant, we look forward to even more success. S-5

6 Wholly Versatile Using the whole fruit or vegetable increases flavor and nutrition in new consumer products and applications. THE FRUIT, THE whole fruit, and nothing but the fruit. That s the basic principle behind Milne MicroDried ingredients. And it s why they re so versatile. From salad to dessert, plus beverages and snacks, MicroDried ingredients have the versatility to be part of every new consumer product. That s because MicroDried processes more than 20 fruit and vegetable varieties into a broad range of possible particulate sizes, with the ability to match moisture and texture to the demands of any application. VARIETY OF APPLICATIONS The versatility of MicroDried ingredients means that a lot of applications, both current and potential, use them. In fact, more than 50 consumer products on the market today use Micro- Dried ingredients, including: Peach, black currant, strawberry and cranberry powders for teas, both bagged and instant. Strawberry and mango for a two-compartment yogurt pack. Powder and whole pieces of blueberries, strawberries and other berries, for hot and ready-to-eat (RTE) breakfast cereal. MicroDried ingredients are especially useful for adding fruit to breakfast products. S-6 A supplement to Food Processing magazine

7 Powders, bits and cubes of strawberries, pineapples and mangoes for nutritional/ snack bars. Blueberry fragments and whole blueberries, cranberries and peas for pet food and pet treats. Pomegranate arils and strawberry pieces for creamy cheese. Cranberry powder for beef jerky. Various powders and fragments for candy, cookies, popcorn and other confections. Strawberry and other powders for ice cream and gelato. Strawberry slices and whole blueberries for scones, muffins and other bakery products. One of MicroDried s many satisfied customers is Zuke s LLC, a pet-food processor based in Durango, Colo. Zuke s niche is high-end, high-energy food and treats for active dogs and other pets. It has a line of grain-free dog food that, in the words of Operations Director David Rizzo, provide higher levels of whole-food ingredient nutrition. These and other Zuke s products use Micro- Dried ingredients, including sweet potato, peas, cranberries, blueberries, carrots, cherries and mango. MicroDried ingredients are superior in large part because they re so close to the original form, Rizzo says. We are committed to using the highest-quality ingredients and believe that Milne s sourcing of raw materials to create the finished products is aligned with or exceeds our expectations, he says. It is also important to know that the ingredients are minimally processed and have a smaller energy footprint than alternative drying technologies. These ingredients are superior to other alternatively dried ingredient forms because they retain so much of the original integrity of the raw ingredient. Other applications include craft beer, nutraceutical products including pills and tablets, protein dry mixes and more. The reason for this versatility, broadly speaking, is the high quality of MicroDried ingredients over those dried by other methods. MicroDried uses the whole fruit, which increases flavor and nutritional value, and nothing but the fruit, which MicroDried ingredients are used in over 50 consumer products, including popcorn, beer, teas and dog food. S-7

8 is important with today s emphasis on all-natural, wholesome foods and clean labels. Our product has a very clean ingredient slate because it s just the fruit, says Heidi Farkas, Micro- Dried s National Sales and Marketing Manager. The nutritional benefits of the MicroDried process are extensive, for the simple reason that it uses the entire fruit skin, seeds and all. This means that the profile of vitamins, minerals, protein, fiber, antioxidants, phytonutrients and other nutritional benefits remains very close to the raw material. The difference in fiber between MicroDried powder ingredients and those dried by other methods is especially striking. MicroDried uses the entire base food in the drying process which preserves fiber content and cell integrity better than alternative methods. These two advantages are especially important to ingredients like carrots, whose high fiber content is responsible for a large part of their consumer appeal and translate to more authentic flavor that is as close to fresh as possible. Conversely, the wide range of particle sizes, all with top-notch individual piece integrity, makes MicroDried ingredients more versatile in blending applications. MicroDried ingredients can be pre-blended, either with each other or with many other dry, non-gmo ingredients and arrive at the end user s door ready to be used in a single step. The particle integrity and the wide range of particle sizes give MicroDried ingredients more pieces and more volume. A pound of MicroDried whole cultivated blueberries has 3,500 pieces; MicroDried blueberry fragments can have more than 10,000. By comparison, freeze-dried blueberries have 3,200 pieces per pound; infusiondried, 1,000; and IQF whole pieces, only 400. MicroDried blueberries have six times more pieces and three times more volume than fresh ones. MORE VIBRANT COLORS Color is another important advantage that goes to the core literally. Freeze-drying often results in product particulates that are pale or even white at the center, which compromises MicroDried ingredients are closer to their natural state with remarkably more vibrant colors. S-8 A supplement to Food Processing magazine

9 and flattens the color when milled into powder. Other drying methods, such as infused drying, use high temperature dryers that often brown or darken the color of the raw fruit. The MicroDried process gently dries the ingredients at lower temperatures. This preserves the natural color of the ingredient pieces. Thus, strawberry powders are a vibrant red instead of pink and blueberry powders are royal blue instead of a washed out, pale blue. The difference is so remarkable that MicroDried ingredients can and are being used as coloring agents, allowing the ingredient label to avoid the dreaded phrase artificial colors. If you look at a blueberry or cranberry powder that s been spray-dried or drum-dried, generally they re utilizing concentrate, says Steve Nugent, Director of IQF, Dried and Export Sales for Milne. With our product, you are getting the whole fruit. You are getting all the seed, all the skin, all the fiber, everything that s in that cranberry is going into that powder, or going into that whole cranberry or that fragmented cranberry. It s the same thing with a blueberry, a blackberry, a raspberry it doesn t matter. You re getting all the ingredients of the whole fruit. The MicroDried process is so innovative that the company s growth depends more on new, even experimental end uses than on old ones, Farkas says. We ve had some successes in transitioning someone who s currently using freeze-dried or infused-dried in their application over to Micro- Dried, but really, most of our significant growth has come from customers formulating new products. These include puffed lentils, a snack that appeals to consumers desire for healthy snacking, and dried wine-varietal grapes, an experimental product made with the grapes used to make chardonnay, Riesling and other popular wines. The bottom line is that MicroDried ingredients make foods taste better simply because they re closer to the natural state. This makes a difference in all kinds of applications, even those as seemingly simple as a bowl of cereal. When you re eating your bowl of cereal, that milk is nice and blue, and it s blue because there s real blueberry in that cereal, Nugent says. S-9

10 Coming to Fruition MicroDried took a new way to dry blueberries and built it into a portfolio of innovative ingredients. MILNE MICRODRIED S PORTFOLIO of ingredients is the result of innovative thinking and a drive to bring added value to different fruits and vegetables that are often commoditized in many ways. Looking beyond traditional fresh produce and canning, a forward-thinking management team took note of a new drying process that was developed more than 20 years ago. Known as the radiant energy vacuum (REV) process, it was created by Tim Durance, a professor at the University of British Columbia, who founded EnWave Corp. in 1996 to further develop and market the new drying process. He first experimented with the new technology using blueberries, which are widely grown in British Columbia, and found some success. The first big U.S. market for the new drying process came in 2012 when MicroDried was established and became the first company to commercialize the new technology successfully. A division of Wyckoff Farms in Grandview, Wash., MicroDried installed a nutrarev line in a new 40,000 sq. ft. plant built in Nampa, Idaho. Blueberries and blackberries were among the first MicroDried products to be commercialized. Some of the original end uses for MicroDried blueberries included a cookie-based cheesecake crust, a cereal bar marketed mostly in Canada, puffed-rice crackers and bagged cereals. Today, cereals and energy/nutritional bars remain two of the most frequent end uses for Micro- Dried products. It took MicroDried 18 to 24 months after launch to really take off, company executives say. We didn t have product in the marketplace until the late second half of 2012, says Steve Nugent, Director of IQF, Dried and Export Sales for Milne. We only had two products [at first], blackberries and blueberries. Once we got strawberries, cranberries and other products into our product line, that really started to open up the market for us. MicroDried is exclusively licensed to use the nutrarev technology for its products. When a company buys a license for the EnWave technology for a particular product, it has the S-10 A supplement to Food Processing magazine

11 exclusive right to use it for that product in its territory. We grant exclusive licenses based on geographic territory to a variety of companies operating in multiple food market verticals, and MicroDried has a list of products they can produce, says Brent Charleton, Senior Vice President of Business Development for EnWave Corp. In terms of licenses, we agree that we will not sell other licenses to competitors in their territory, so it provides our partners with distinct competitive advantages. In MicroDried s case, that territory is nationwide, making it the sole source for the products in its portfolio. That undoubtedly has helped the company s success. MicroDried is the only viable source for commercial users interested in ingredients dried with the nutrarev technology. Peppers are hot new additions to the MicroDried product line. We had sold machines prior to the partnership, but MicroDried was the first commercially successful partner of EnWave, Charleton says. Nugent echoes that assessment. We re the only people that I m aware of that have been able to make the technology commercially viable, he says. There certainly are other people that have licensed the technology, for fruits and other things, but we ve been able to get into the market and make it commercially viable on a large scale. Because MicroDried ingredients are so innovative, growth has depended more on newly developed end uses than on established ones, Sweet potatoes are a new consumer favorite and are available in slices, cubes and fragments. says Heidi Farkas, National Sales and Marketing Manager. It was a new technology and new product, so we ve had most of our successes in new product development, Farkas says. And success has come quickly. The plant has been running 24/7 for months and has been capable of supporting six major cereal launches, along with other customer contracts. Currently, MicroDried is in the process of commissioning a second line in a 20,000 sq. ft. addition to the Nampa plant. What takes us two days to do on the original line, we ll be able to do in 12 hours on this second line, says Nugent. The plant has an AA certification from BRC and a superior rating from AIB. It s also OU kosher and certified organic each year by the Washington State Department of Agriculture. Milne MicroDried also offers a growing line of organic ingredients, including goldenberries, aronia, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, cherries and cranberries. S-11

12 For a relatively young company, MicroDried has a strong pedigree in terms of fruit. The parent company, Wyckoff Farms, was established in 1950 and is one of the largest blueberry growers in the U.S. MicroDried s sister division is Milne Fruit, which was established in 1956 as Prosser Packers and renamed Milne in In 2004, Milne was acquired by the Wyckoff family and it was producing juices, concentrates and purees, mostly from Concord grapes. Over the years, the company has expanded its product line to include more than 25 different fruit and vegetable varieties and now produces more than 50 ingredient products. The relationship among Wyckoff Farms, Milne Fruit and Milne MicroDried is symbiotic. Because they use many of the same raw materials, they are able to establish vertical integration for several key products, which leads to improved quality assurance. There are a lot of things that are vertically integrated in our product line, Nugent says. We re 100 percent vertically integrated on blueberries, for example. What that means is, all of the blueberries that we use are raised on our [Wyckoff] farms and processed at our IQF facilities, and then dried at our Nampa facility. In addition to blueberries, MicroDried is developing products based on wine-varietal and Concord grapes and aronia berries grown by Wyckoff Farms. We are in the middle of the expansion project, and we are doing some commissioning on the new dryer now, Farkas says. We are on target for selling product from the new line early this summer. This will more than double our capacity, Nugent adds. This expansion is something the company envisioned from the very beginning. I see us fully using all of that capacity in the very near future. If the company continues on its current trajectory, the plant will be ready for another addition. We ve got the synergies in place to further expand the plant quickly, because we sized the infrastructure for expansion. If we keep growing the way we have been, we ll need more capacity. It s a good problem to have. Pineapple and mango are among the tropical fruit varieties available sales@milnemicrodried.com milnemicrodried.com S-12 A supplement to Food Processing magazine