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Recent Major Beverage Trends’ Evolution

Consumer tastes and preferences for beverages are evolving toward a greater emphasis on health, reshaping beverage supply chains. A rising affinity for lower alcohol content, natural ingredients, sugar-free, or vitamin-rich drinks is observed. Consumers are seeking out flavourful alternatives such as alcohol-free beer, fruity drinks, protein shakes, and soft drinks. With all these demands considered, high-level challenges in formulation remain in the beverage industry.

As a result, beverage companies must meet the needs of the evolving consumer-led industry and adapt quickly to consumer habits, and improving the homogeneity and quality of high-demand beverages. Beverage companies are therefore compelled to evaluate and innovate their process from bottling to the consumer.

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Microtrac offers products for all particle size analysis technologies.

Tackling Beverage Stability by Measuring Ring Formation

Microtrac provides solutions and products that can help companies achieve the highest quality. Specifically, the Turbiscan range offers solutions to develop, optimize, and control the stability, homogeneity, and shelf-life of drinks and beverages.

One of them is evaluating healthier weighting agent alternatives to stabilize beverage emulsions. Finished beverages like fruit juices are made by diluting concentrated beverage emulsions with weighting agents like brominated vegetable oil (BVO), leading to very unstable dilutions.

By removing classical weighting agents, manufacturers are working to stop the deterioration process of unstable dilutions, which create a ring formation around the neck of the beverage container, also known as creaming. The process of ring formation is a powerful indicator of beverage emulsion stability. Microtrac proposes a method to assess the efficiency of a new natural weighting agent and find an optimum concentration that delays deterioration and formation of the ring, improving ring formation kinetics.

For this article, we focus on vegetable oil and studies of this healthier weighting agent, which also resulted in a final ring size comparable to the currently used BVO weighting agent, making it an effective and suitable alternative. These results from measurements with Turbiscan SMLS technology provide a solution for stabilizing beverages. The method proposed by Microtrac helps reduce the time needed to evaluate shelf-life and phenomena by months (up to 1,000 times faster than standard methods).

Employing non-invasive technology to assess beverage shelf-life

Precise shelf-life determination, specifically within the booming market of THC-infused beverages, is being addressed by Microtrac as well. The shelf-life of these beverages is subject to the destabilization of oil, which in turn affects the potency of aging THC-infused drinks. The TURBISCAN method was used to perform long-term monitoring of THC-infused beverage stability.

Ultimately, these studies assessed volume fraction kinetics and quantified the destabilization of THC-infused beverages, providing evidence of the high stability of samples over a diverse set of temperatures and concentrations. This innovative method expands how THC-infused beverages can be studied and eliminates errors or inconsistencies from traditional invasive measurement procedures.

Optimizing the clarification process of wine, soft drinks, and beer

Clarification of beverages like wine and beer is also crucial for ensuring quality production. In collaboration with the French Institute of Wine Research, we conducted a comparative evaluation of the efficiency of two vegetal proteins used to clarify red wine. These fining agents are essential to encourage the sedimentation of particles and reduce the number of filtration cycles needed to achieve a wine’s desired brightness and stability. The study found the optimal vegetable protein and concentration for wine fining by using TURBISCAN technology, which allows for the quantification of migration rates and determination of sediment layer height. While milk and vegetable milk are not a topic for this article, it is important to note the diverse applications beverage research has on the industry and its many drinks.

This non-invasive evaluation of protein efficiency for wine clarification holds promise for high-quality wine producers, showing that a medium-concentration fining agent initiates sedimentation sooner and the sediment layer thickness is comparable to that of a high concentration agent.

Regarding soft drinks, TURBISCAN works with both concentrated and diluted samples. One of the main problems with soft drink formulation is the ‘stabilizers’ available for food-grade drinks. Two primary stabilizers, including Arabic gum, are natural and therefore composition depends on harvest quality and weather. As innovation progresses, alternatives are being considered, though these have yet to meet the effectiveness of the gum. We are working to address these challenges using advanced technology and research methods.

Improvements to beverage clarification are not limited to wine and soft drinks. Using TURBISCAN technology, we conducted experiments to compare the effects of temperature on the rate of wort clarification which is key in the beer-making process. Heat allows impurities to coagulate on the wort, a sweet liquid from malt. The experiments supported the parallel relationship between increased temperature and increased rate of clarification, an important step in determining the sediment formation speed in beer.

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Ultimately, the choice of whether to use a simple sieving solution or to invest in Laser Diffraction or Dynamic Image Analysis will depend on the volume of testing, the budgets and staffing available and any specific international standards or customer requirements that you face.

Why not contact Microtrac for a free consultation to find out which solution will deliver the outcome and the Return on Investment you need?