Beyond Standard Spray Drying: How Custom Solutions Accelerate Your Product to Market

By Stephen Enloe, Ulli Lindauer and Will West | Advanced Powder Dynamics

Advanced Powder Dynamics provides custom spray drying and engineered powder solutions, achieving precise particle size distribution and morphology to enhance product performance. Their expertise allows for tailored granule characteristics, improving flowability by up to 30% and reducing dusting by over 20% for specific applications. This interview addresses common challenges and emerging trends in powder technology, offering practical insights for manufacturers seeking optimal material properties. Advanced Powder Dynamics’ commitment to innovation ensures clients receive solutions that meet stringent quality and performance standards. Stephen Enloe will explore key topics including advanced spray drying techniques for novel materials, strategies for controlling particle aggregation, and the impact of powder characteristics on downstream processing efficiency. He will also discuss emerging applications in pharmaceuticals and food science. Readers will gain actionable knowledge on optimizing powder properties for improved product quality and manufacturing efficiency, enabling informed decisions for material development and process enhancement.

TL;DR – Quick Summary

Unlock the power of custom spray drying for your unique product needs.

Customization Benefits: Custom spray drying offers unparalleled customization for specific product objectives, including particle size, flowability, and density, differentiating it from standard methods.

Dynamic Atomization: Advanced Powder Dynamics (APD) utilizes ‘dynamic atomization’ technology for rapid prototyping and iteration, allowing for quick development and market entry, with a proven track record of taking projects from concept to commercialization in as little as 30 days.

Partner Evaluation: When evaluating contract spray drying partners, look beyond mainstream providers; ask specific questions about their equipment’s ability to handle viscous, fragile, or heat-sensitive ingredients to ensure compatibility with your unique product.

Consultation Process: The initial consultation phase involves a deep dive into product performance requirements and business objectives, followed by a detailed questionnaire and confirmation of quantitative and qualitative metrics to ensure consistent results.

Project Timelines: Typical lead times for custom spray drying can range from weeks to over a year, depending on project complexity and whether it’s a new or existing product, but APD has demonstrated the ability to complete projects from formulation to commercialization in just five weeks.

Pro tip: Clearly define your desired end product’s performance, appearance, and feel before engaging with a spray drying partner; this clarity is crucial for them to effectively reverse-engineer the process and deliver your specific output.

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Understanding Custom Spray Drying vs. Standard Methods

Stephen: Hi guys, thanks for all coming on to this call today. I just wanted to get us all in one place. We’re gonna be doing this more often it seems like, but we just wanted to get on and answer a bunch of questions that some of the consumers are having lately, as well as just address some of the topics that it seems like people wanna know a lot more about. So that everyone who’s listening understands where the perspectives are coming from and a little bit about who you guys are. If you guys just want to introduce yourselves one at a time here and just say your name and your title of where you guys are at and where you work here. Will, let’s start with you.

Will: Sure. Sure. Absolutely. Thank you, Stephen. It’s Will West, the co-founder and CEO of Tesseract Life Sciences, which owns Advanced Powder Dynamics.

Ulli: Excellent. Thank you, Will. I’m Ulli Lindauer. I’m the Chief Marketing Officer at Tesseract Life Sciences. I oversee the marketing and commercialization efforts on Tesseract Life Sciences and of its three subsidiaries, Tesseract Medical Research, Finished Products, BioTess, which is wholesale ingredients. as well as advanced powder dynamics and today we are specifically talking about advanced powder dynamics.

Hendrik: Good morning and thank you, Steven. My name is Hendrik Grobler and I’m the Chief Operations Officer here at Advanced Powder Dynamics in Payson, Arizona. We do product development and I’m in charge of the product development facility and also on the production facility. And we’re also the production arm for Tesseract manufacturing with Tesseract Medical Research.

Stephen: Awesome. And I think that’s such a really great spread of perspectives here because I think we have from Will, obviously we have the more CEO, entrepreneurial, kind of the consumer on that side of things type of perspective from Ulli. Obviously we’ve got a little bit more of the direct to consumer kind of marketing and more personal aspect of things. And then Hendrik, I’m really excited to hear. some of the more technical aspects of things as you’re on a lot of the operations. So without further ado, let’s get into the questions. So first question is going to be, What are the main advantages of choosing custom spray drying over standard processing methods for my specific product formulation?

Hendrik: Okay. I’ll answer that question and then Will and Ulli can also jump in. I think it is the ability to customize and design a formulation based on the product objectives. So that, for example, is what delivery system is required and so forth. And then also the specific power characteristic requirements. Those are things like particle size, flowability, density of the product, and the ability of your CMO or your development partner to differentiate between these objectives and having the exceptional spray drying technology to differentiate between our technology and what other technologies are out there. For example, You need to have a clear understanding of how the liquid properties and that’s the initial product that you’re starting to work with. How, for example, the solids concentration, the viscosity of the material, the temperature requirements of the material, how that will influence the final product or the powder property requirements. If you don’t have a good understanding of that, then your project is going to fail. Also, you have to have access to the latest technology. There are a lot of technologies out there. You have to find somebody that knows the technology and knows what the latest technology is that will comply to these different formulation requirements. Particle engineering is a very important part of that development process. And the customer or the CMO need to understand your specific requirements. for particle engineering and how to apply formulation technologies and also the different particle engineering technologies that’s available there. APD has a technology that we call dynamic atomization. And this technology supports all current formulation technologies out there. And it also has the ability to provide. to comply to all the requirements that you need for particle engineering.

That is if you have specific particle size requirements, particle density requirements, flowability requirements, all of these are critical with regards to the end product and how technology focuses on these requirements. And we also have a proven record to show that we have achieved these requirements for I would say more than 200 different products in the last 20 years.

Will: Your question, Stephen, is about customization and custom spray drying contrasted with more mainstream spray drying. It really depends upon the end goal of the project, the company, and in many ways, the ingredient. If your aspiration is to achieve the lowest cost, with a commodity product, the mainstream spray drying approach is most likely very applicable. There’s a commodity market and a very known set of dryers and common technology that’s built to suit for that, and it’s easily accessible. On the other hand, if you have unique needs, you have unusual products that you’re working with, or you have unusual business goals or diversified and segmented market, then you have to look for a more targeted or customized solution. There is a way to align strategic, technical, and financial goals if you want to pursue a highly customized solution. There are far fewer options. in that scenario or scenarios. But if you do need a highly customized solution, then there are capabilities, for example, the dynamic atomization technology, where you can do very rapid prototyping. And you can do several iterations with an ingredient in a very short time span. And you can understand the alternatives to do different drying, different additives. approaches with that ingredient. You can take one core ingredient and understand different possibilities to create different skews to take that one core ingredient into different marketplaces with different needs. You can take that one core ingredient into different geographies as a result. And a business can pursue global strategies with differentiated segments as a result in very short order, which aligns the corporate strategy, the financial strategies, and diversified outcomes, which satisfies the technical and the financial functions within a business supporting that corporate strategy.

But you have to have the technical resources, the rapid innovation skill set from the dynamic atomization technology that supports it, which mainstream spray drying simply does not have. so technical limitations in mainstream spray drying do not support the level of customization that you may need if you have certain challenging strategic. or financial or market demands placed on a business. so depending upon the business needs and other needs of the business, it may drive the level of customization you need and the technical limitations may rise to the surface. But the ability to rapidly innovate and do iterations with the product, the ability of the technology to create things like a sustained shelf life because of dynamic atomization’s ability to create. ultra low water activity and moisture content in the products so that it can survive in an extended supply chain environment and so on, create unique properties that less customized solutions cannot bring to the table. And so there are considerations that go far beyond what people may generally consider when they think about customization that exists in just one or two functions within a business, I would argue that the considerations for customization span almost every function of a business. And you have to look at the complete picture of the business needs and well beyond just the individual material or technical aspects from the item that’s being dried itself.

Stephen: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I think it’s always a good idea when you are talking about customization in any industry, seems like whether or not it’s necessary, which I’m really glad that you addressed. Is that necessary for every single circumstance or if there is a more commoditized solution, like what you were talking about in the beginning there. So going into that, I think this actually leads into the next question that people are having really well. So how do I evaluate whether a contract dry, excuse me, how do I evaluate whether a contract spray drying company has the right equipment and expertise for the unique powder requirements that I have? So I think in this use case, somebody’s obviously gone through that question, of do I need an actual custom spray? Do I need an actual custom solution? And landing on that they obviously do. So how do you then go through and find out and address whether or not your supplier actually has the ability to do that, right?

Will: Yeah, I think there are quite a few considerations. Hendrik can talk to us about some of the technical ones. I can tell you some of the things that we use in our organization to do that. And sometimes it comes down to how often that material has been produced before in the same or other commercial settings. If it’s a commodity product in a commodity environment that’s been frequently produced before, There may be few questions to answer. Those are products that are perfect for mainstream production by large scale players who can produce at the lowest price. For those individuals and those organizations who are forced to compete on price, then they absolutely need a low cost producer because they’re most likely surviving on limited margins. They either need a low cost producer or they need a partner who can help them create a differentiated product by adding value, by somehow advancing that product either further down the value chain or by creating a very differentiated version of the product that has unique capabilities. Those are two very different things. In our case, we have multiple production lines. that are identical to one another except for their scale. There are orders of magnitude larger than the next smaller line so that we can enjoy the economies of scale but know that when we graduate up to the larger production lines, those products are going to run in an identical fashion to how they did on the smaller lines when they were produced before. And that allows us to do our rapid prototyping at the R&D level and know that once we’ve run them, at the R&D scale, we can predict exactly how they’re going to run all the way through large scale commercialization.

And we have a history of taking projects from the bench top to R&D to pilot to commercialization in 30 days. And we do not know of other organizations that can work that quickly, but also predict when they’re at the bench top and the R&D level in that first week exactly what commercialization is going to look like. That is a tremendous advantage for any client who’s looking to rapidly innovate and enter the market and compete with aggressive competitors. That applies whether they are competing with a known product or they’re trying to innovate to compete or leapfrog competitors. If they’re also trying to take a product that is based on a known ingredient but differentiate it, It adds tremendous value as well because it allows them to do the innovation as they go along and enter the market quickly, but find that differentiation at the same time and get into the market alongside those competitors or in front of those competitors just based upon the configuration of our manufacturing environment. But beyond that, there are a number of technical considerations in the manufacturing production lines that Hendrik can speak to.

Stephen: And Hendrik, just to, if you need the question or if it’s helpful at all, it’s basically just how do I evaluate whether my contract spray drying company has the right equipment for the custom kind of unique powders that I have.

Hendrik: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. so your product development partner or your CMO needs to understand that there are different processes involved when you create powders with very specific requirements. And that includes the liquid handling side, it includes the drying process itself, and then additional to that, also the powder handling. And all three of these processes need to be addressed. the development partner. needs to showcase that he has access to that equipment and the latest equipment available in the market. And it again brings me back to what, and we’ll briefly mention that, and that is the technology that we have, the dynamic atomization technology that can address the most important part of those three processes, which is the drying process itself and the ability to achieve these different. product requirements. And our technology is a proven technology that we have shown multiple times in the past that we can achieve these unique power requirements from customers.

Ulli: Let me add something to that, Stephen. I think some of the criteria that you should apply when selecting a spray drying partner also include things like, what does the onboarding look like? What kind of expertise, like how many years has the company been in business? Are there case studies online? Can I find case studies on the website? Can I find testimonials? Is there an example in what the company does or has published in the past? Is there an example that is closely related to my objectives? It’s always great when you have a situation where you’re basically trying to solve a problem. to see someone who says, yes, I have solved that problem in the past. Here is how we did it. And here is what the outcome was. that to me is very important because the idea that you are putting a valuable resource and financial resources into a partnership with the spray dryer, you want to trust them. Of course, you want to see the data. you want to see, you know, their technology, but you also have to have a feeling that they’ve done this before, there’s credibility, there is authority in terms of when they say this is going to work or this is not going to work, you know, I have a reason to believe that that is the case. So those are some of the maybe not as technical factors that I would definitely look at in my search.

Will: Yeah, there’s another really interesting set of questions to ask to make sure that you’re getting the right spray drying partner. One very common approach that clients or prospective clients take is simply to go with mainstream spray dryers because they’re large and they’ve been in business and they’ve dealt with very large scale projects and they have a known name and that’s fine. Typically those spray dryers have been successful drying commodity ingredients in high volume. for mainstream markets. But the questions that the clients need to ask is whether or not their particular ingredients or their projects fit that model. So for example, do my ingredients always have exactly the same particle size? And are they in that range that this client or this manufacturer can dry? Can they repeat that particle size in a narrow bandwidth? Yes or no. Can they repeat it every single time? Yes or no. What does the bell curve of those particles that are produced look like under this dryer? Is it wide or is it narrow? Can this dryer work with. Highly viscous materials, yes or no? Is my particular ingredient highly viscous? Does it fit in their model, yes or no? Can they work with very fragile ingredients? Is my ingredient too fragile for this particular spray dryer, yes or no? Has the spray dryer worked with hundreds of different ingredients? Is mine outside of this typical range? Because many spray dryers cannot work with highly viscous materials. They cannot work with highly fragile materials. They cannot work with ingredients that. need to be dried at very high heat for a very brief moment, like half a second, rather than going through the 25 or 30 second cycle of spray drying.

Because doing so would change the morphology of the particles and create a powder that will work for the markets and the segments and the use case that the client has in mind. So the client who’s asking this question about the equipment that they need. for the spray dryer has to think about how that ingredient is going to perform on the equipment by asking these very specific questions about what that equipment is going to do to the ingredient, to the particles that come out of that equipment, and whether or not that powder is going to perform in the segments for the applications that the client and the company has in mind.

Stephen: No, those are all great points, yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I actually, it’s funny, the way that you guys have answered these questions just by chance has actually led really well into the next ones. I think, Ulli, I think you were talking even specifically about this, but I think Ulli, you were even talking specifically about this, but asking about not just the product, not just the actual specifications, but the people behind the organization, right? That’s a huge part of it, because at the end of the day, you are working with people, and those people do have a track record, they do have abilities. So within that first kind of stage of it, the question is, what should I expect during the initial consultation and sample testing phase with a toll spray drying manufacturer?

Hendrik: So the initial consultation normally happens over the phone or a video call with a customer. And as Will and Ulli rightfully just discussed or mentioned all these questions, there’s a array of questions that we go through with the customer. We first have to determine what is the product performance requirements and then what is the business objective for the customers. And those two parts is very important or very important parts of the discussion. Firstly, to determine or the ability to determine what are the product requirements. That’s with regards to the delivery system, the end product characteristics, and again, that’s the flowability requirements, the particle size distribution requirements, the density requirements, and then we have to showcase our ability to achieve these requirements through the technology that we have. on our side. At the same time, the medium to long term objectives of the customer with regards to how soon do they want to commercialize the product and in what way do they want to commercialize this product. And then again, back to what is the packaging requirements based on the delivery system requirements. That forms the initial consultation with the customer. we follow that up with a questionnaire where we address each one of these questions. And additional to that, it is questions, for example, like what is the certification requirements? Is it halal? Is it kosher? Is it organic? What GMP or other quality certifications do they require? And then obviously, all of this is then combined into a document. where we confirm what are the metrics and what are the quantitative and qualitative metrics that we have to apply to make sure that we achieve these objectives time and time and again. And we’ll also mention that.

So that’s the ability to evaluate the product objectives, evaluate the product achievements that you have done on these different levels through the development work. whether it’s the small scale dryer and then scaling it up to the next, the medium sized dryer, the optimization trials, and then the scale up trials, and then obviously to commercialization. And you have to have the ability to prove to the customer that every single time you have achieved the original requirements with regards to the powder specifications, packaging specifications, liquid handling specifications. And then how are you going to achieve that every single time going forward? And once you achieve the commercialization, that you again can achieve those requirements.

Ulli: I want to add something to that which I think is extremely important, not only in this particular spray drying context but in general, which is as a customer or a client or a partner of a spray drying organization or company, when you… get ready for the initial consultation. It is extremely important to understand exactly what you want out of this process. is probably the single most critical thing that you can bring is a very clear understanding. What do you want the final product to do, look like, feel like? how to perform under any given set of circumstances. And so the more specific a customer can be in putting forward these requirements or these asks, because ultimately a spray dryer, be it advanced powder dynamics or any other, is going to attempt to solve this customer’s problem. The problem is I have something here and I need it to be transformed into this over here. And this end result over here, that has to be very, very well understood. And then we can backward, basically backward think and backward develop. How do we make this input into this desired output? If there is no clarity on what the output exactly looks like feels like performs like there will be many discussions in the meantime and the team at every spray dryer company will be there to have those conversations. But these input requirements are so very, important. I cannot overstate that.

Stephen: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think that that’s just something that goes in general with the direction of any business that you really do have to understand. And I think Will, talked about it a little bit. Hendrik, you talked about it a little bit. But the possibilities are so endless when you guys are doing, you know. powderization in this way, when you guys are designing products in this way, you can really go so many different directions that you have to understand what your end goal is so that you can reverse engineer it like you were talking about.

Ulli: Can I just maybe also hand it over to Hendrik again because in your question there was also a little bit a question around sample testing. How does that look like when our samples tested? In the initial conversation, what does the testing protocol look like? wanted to go back to the second part of your original question, Stephen, and maybe this is a good one for Hendrik because I don’t really have the background for that. What does the sample testing protocol look like in an initial consultation or right when the process is started?

Hendrik: When we when we do the initial consultation with the customer Like I said that the questions that do last will pertain to specific father property and power characteristic requirements and then what is the ability of the product development partner to to actually address that those requirements and if they don’t have an in-house lab with the proper equipment to evaluate and test that and those were the quantitative and qualitative measures that I was referring to earlier, you have to have the equipment in your lab so that you can do in-process testing and that in-process is during the product development phase, also on production scale. Do the test, the proper testing so that you can evaluate whether you are achieving those results or not. And those specific things again, they refer to moisture content in the powder, water activity, flowability, particle size distribution, and so forth.

Stephen: Hmm, that makes sense. So the next question that we have here is what are the typical lead times and minimum order quantities when working with a custom spray drying service provider?

Hendrik: I think we’ll answer some of that previously, but basically what it is, the typical lead times ranges from a few weeks to several months, even to more than a year or maybe sometimes two years. It depends on the complexity and obviously the scale of the project. It depends on whether it’s a current spray-dry product or whether it’s a completely new product with new formulation requirements. And unless the manufacturer or your development partner has the experience and the ability to take on a complete project or a complex project like this, it could take months and years for them to go through the development process. We’ll mention that we recently are at APD due to the fact that we have a very comprehensive and robust development process. we took a new formulation requirement from a customer from the formulation development through initial lab tests, through pilot scale trials, through optimization trials, through scale-up demonstration, to commercialization level in five weeks. And the reason that we can do that is because we have the development processing. place and we have achieved this through the last 20 years and developed this through the last 20 years to achieve specific customer requirements. If a customer have long lead times, we can accommodate that. If a customer have very specific lead short lead times and they want to bring a product to commercialization in short time frame, we have the processes and the procedures in place to accomplish that.

Will: Yeah, it’s interesting, Stephen, your question is really, what are the lead times? And I’m reminded of, I think there’s a book from decades ago, something to the effect of everything I needed to know I learned in kindergarten. It comes back to the concept of work expands to fill the time allotted. And the reality is that people are. been coached, including my companies, we’re often told that we need four months to get you into a manufacturing slot, et cetera. It’s very common. People are busy. Sure, companies are busy. Manufacturing environments are unpredictable. R&D teams and management teams, have a lot on our plate. But the reality is it comes down to two things, and this is what people need to know. The time it takes to get something done is based on a. What is the actual capacity and capability of a partner to execute? And two, what is their willingness to execute within that capacity? Those are the only two things. What is their capability and what is their willingness? And I’ve given examples before and Hendrik petered them. We have taken people from concept through bench top R&D pilot commercialization in 30 days. And we can do it again. We can do it regularly. But it really comes down to what is the willingness of a company to work within their means to move a new client through that pace quickly if they want to. And for that, the prospect, the client has to know exactly what they want. They have to have the intent to move forward quickly. They have to be willing to make decisions. They have to show that intent to their partner.

mean, no spray dryer, regardless of their capabilities, is going to make time for a client if they don’t send the signals to the company that they are serious. And we get a lot of interest from companies that are not serious. And we have too many things to do to stop what we’re doing and work with companies that are not serious. I mean, we talk to them. We spend time with them. But our message is, here’s what we need to know. Please go figure it out. Come back when you’re ready to do business. And then we engage with them. But we have a lot of people that are lined up to have those conversations. And we spend our time with those who are serious. And then we move very rapidly. And yeah, we can do things that other companies can’t. That’s why they come to us. But the important thing is partnership takes intent from both sides. And once you find the partner that has the capabilities, has the equipment, that can move in a month or two months or whatever timeframe you require. You have to know your market, know where you’re going, know what product you want, know that the partner you’re choosing can deliver on that. Otherwise, you shouldn’t be approaching them because you’re wasting your time in theirs and you’ll never get where you want to go within the timeframe you have in mind.

Stephen: Yeah. And honestly, that’s impressive though. 30 days of a turnaround for any manufacturing process that has any sort of, you know, testing or anything like that in there is, is really, I mean, that’s impressive. Even if somebody knows exactly what they want in a lot of industries.

How to Vet Your Contract Spray Drying Partner

Will: Yeah, and for us, that’s, yeah, absolutely. that’s testing all the raw materials coming in. That’s evaluation of multiple potential source materials so we understand how they’re going to run with yields and so on at full commercialization. That’s soup to nuts. But the important thing is getting the absolute best product out of the end of the process. And that requires true partnership along the way. And it has to be a good match. And again, that’s, comes down to excellent communication starting at the very beginning. It’s a rigorous process.

Stephen: Yeah, it sounds like it. That’s really cool though. So I think that you kind of spoke about this a little bit or rather touched on it a little bit in the past, both Will and Hendrik. But I wanna talk more specifically and I know this is part of the reason I think why you guys originally got involved with each other even. But. How do toll spray drying companies ensure consistent batch to batch quality and maintain my product specifications?

Hendrik: from, I think firstly, most important is well communicated and agreed upon and proven processes and procedures. And those should be based on the current regulatory requirements and other quality requirements, whether it’s religious requirements or global quality requirements. These things are essential to start the product development process with. Also having the best dryer control systems and the latest drying technologies available for scaling and for repeating processes. If you don’t have well documented and updated powder specifications and process setups and requirements to ensure that you are going to achieve this and that you have the records that you can go back to and track these achievements, what you’ve done previously, then you won’t know if you’ve achieved these requirements. APD, for example, have well-established quality-based process and procedures in place. We have a well-established batch record system in place. So every time that we do a campaign for a customer, we have a recorded. batch sheets that is based on the batching requirements and based on the formulation requirements from the customer that is again agreed upon with the customer. And we do this every single time. We don’t start a campaign. However, how many times we’ve done it in the past, we will go back to the customer and we will confirm the exact requirements from the formulation side, from the blending and batching side, and then also from the power characteristics and requirements side. And that is the transparency that we have, that is open communication that we have with our customers. And that confirms that, or that confirms that yes, we will achieve those requirements every single time, regardless of what scale you are performing that production run on.