Toll Spray Drying for New Product & Market Segments

TL;DR

This discussion highlights how advanced powder processing technologies, particularly dynamic atomization, enable companies to refine and expand their product portfolios, tapping into new market segments without significant capital investment. By partnering with specialists offering servicess like toll spray drying and contract powder processing, companies can leverage existing distribution channels to introduce new SKUs or vastly improve current offerings. This approach allows for differentiation, enabling entry into higher-value market segments with products exhibiting superior characteristics. The focus extends beyond simply creating new products to supercharging existing ones, providing significant competitive advantages. The importance of rigorous cleaning and sanitation protocols for all equipment, from drain chambers to nozzles, is also emphasized to ensure product integrity and compliance in these advanced processing environments. Such partnerships provide a critical pathway for market expansion and product innovation, especially in specialized areas like microencapsulation servicess and pharmaceutical spray drying.

Expanding Product Portfolios Through Advanced Powder Processing

Hendrik: I would say number one is your contract manufacturer must have a validated and well-recorded quality management system that includes a clear and well-defined product specification confirmation process. You have to define the customer’s objectives and you have to be able to obtain those requirements through a robust but very controlled development process. For powder purity, it is absolutely the correct dryer design. It should be of sanitary construction, fabricated from stainless steel and for food crate applications, and preferably with CIP, which is clean in place. The design should also accommodate atomization methods that would not cause degradation of nozzles due to mildly abrasive materials or minerals. APD, for example, have ceramic feed tubes and feed nozzles to prevent any impurities in finished powder from degrading stainless steel caused by abrasion.

Hendrik: The drying air should be from an indirect heat source that should not cause contamination due to combustion or other air heating impurities. All other air flows, such as pneumatic conveyance air that enters the process, should be clean and filtered. And then no mechanical shear or no moving parts that could cause impurities, again, due to abrasion.

With regards to particle size specification requirements, those requirements are directly related to efficient and effective atomization and droplet size creation. APD’s highly effective and controllable dynamic atomization technology supports these specific particle size and distribution requirements in the mineral product space.

Ulli: That makes sense., I think this next question is something that I’ve always wondered about when talking with you guys and when talking about how versatile the manufacturing process is and how many different types of things that you create within your one facility. What cleaning and changeover procedures are necessary when processing multiple beverage flavors of the same spray dryer?

Hendrik: For food safety and for preventing flavor cross-contamination, strict and validated clean-in-place procedures and practices are required. Cleaning and sanitation steps must be tested, verified and recorded for each utilized piece of equipment and the different process vessels such as the drain chamber, cyclone and also powder seething and handling equipment Small items such as screens nozzles actuators conveyance lines etc should also be included in the cleaning and sanitation protocols It should also be of sanitary construction Product verification and sequence control is also important.

Hendrik: Different flavors may be dried and agreed upon sequence that are less conducive to flavor cross-contamination.

Additional manual and mechanical cleaning may also be incorporated for certain flavors. And then finally, cleaning and sanitation agents or chemicals must always be approved, tested, and verified, and periodically reviewed for effectiveness. The golden rule applies for changeover procedures. If it wasn’t recorded, it didn’t happen. Quality should always be involved during changeover and ensure that line clearance was performed and recorded every single time.

Ulli: I love that statement. If it wasn’t recorded, it didn’t happen. I feel like that transfers over to a lot of things that just require a certain sense of detail. Moving on to the last question that we have today which we’ve really flown through these questions today. The last question is, how can toll spray drying services help me enter new markets without investing in specialized equipment for niche applications?

Hendrik: APD focuses on creating long-term relationships and partnerships with the objective to support customers in product improvement and portfolio expansion. Well, I think you and Uli may want to add more to this.

Leveraging Contract Services for Market Entry and Product Refinement

Will: Yeah, I would say that Uli and I can both chime in here. We have a number of great examples and a growing list of cases with partners who are already quite successful, but where our technology is proving very valuable for their business strategy and their business growth is helping them expand their business by refining their product portfolio, helping them expand their product portfolio to introduce new SKUs with variations of product that help them refine their view of the market and target new SKUs for segments, not only within their existing markets, but in new markets. We have an excellent case that we’re working on right now with a client who successfully exports their product to 52 countries around the world. And we recently did some work with them, and the channels told them that the product we created was almost too good.

Will: And so we continued to refine those new SKUs, but it showed that they could take the products that we had created into new markets that were more demanding with higher margin. And so we’re going into two completely new higher segment, higher level markets in those countries because the distribution channels that they already have cover those market segments.

And so they can take product that has the same basic characteristics but speak to higher segments within those markets and higher level customer groups and use the same distribution channels that they already have because distributors are familiar with the basic products and the characteristics of it and enter those markets in 52 countries. And so considering that they have the supply chain, they have the production partner through us and are now able to produce even higher value, higher margin product and send it through the same distribution channel.

Will: Those distribution partners will be very eager to take this product that they’re already familiar with, use the same resources because they have the staff in those countries to distribute the product, and they don’t have to be educated. They understand the product because they’ve been working with product from the same company for years. It’s a very rapid way of bringing sophisticated new SKUs to a global market for them. It’s a very exciting example of how they can use our technology to rapidly expand their business with new revenue streams, new margin and new profit.

The Role of Technology in Differentiating Existing Products

Ulli: Yeah. And Stephen, one of the things I’d like to add here, Advanced Powder Dynamics and Tesseract Life Sciences as the holding company above, we have an incredible suite of technologies and patents in our, let’s say, quiver. And so a lot of times existing or new customers will come to us and want to solve a problem we have in general i would say we will have at least one viable solution approach to their challenge because we do not only this very specialized drying this flash drying technology. We also do cyclodextrin inclusion. We have multiple patents and we’ll talk about those in terms of we have the ability to stack two molecules in a single cyclodextrin cavity. And so there are so many pieces that we have that we know to deploy and we have the machinery to do it that a customer doesn’t really need to invest in any equipment when they come to us and we’ll do a solution strategy for them, which is super helpful because differentiation goes, yes, you can enter new categories, new market segments, new products, but you can also just vastly improve upon your existing product, which is what Will was talking about.

Ulli: Like partnering, supercharging an existing product with a new technology is really an interesting way of maintaining everything you already have and layering significant competitive advantages on top of it and so that’s that’s one of the things that advanced powder dynamics is really good at and it seems also like part of the benefit of working with you guys is you guys have so many different touch points in the industry, whereas one company only really has their product information, their understanding of the market, their exposure to different areas of that market.

You guys have so much oversight with so many different clients, so you’re able to pull unique creative solutions and different strategies to suggest within that, which I feel like is really useful even just on the strategy side of things.

Ulli: Have you seen that play out interestingly with clients on the strategy side of things where you can see, okay, we did this with this other client over here. It worked really well. Let me translate that over to this other part of the market and help this other client.

Will: We’re seeing that weekly, I would say, now because we serve so many markets, so many market segments, and we never breach confidence. But what we’re finding is that our clients love it. When we play matchmaker, we do introductions, we give them key accounts from our network. In fact, the example I gave a minute ago, the client puts products in the animal husbandry business, and as they upgrade into higher value segments, we’re helping them go into the pet market, the human market, etc. And we have tremendous relationships in those spaces. And so the way that we start to do that is by introducing them to players in those categories who want to be early adopters of those products.

Will: And that gives them case studies that they can use to illustrate to the global market how those new SKUs can be used.

In fact, the example I gave a minute ago, the client puts products in the animal husbandry business, and as they upgrade into higher value segments, we’re helping them go into the pet market, the human market, etc. And we have tremendous relationships in those spaces. And so the way that we start to do that is by introducing them to players in those categories who want to be early adopters of those products. And that gives them case studies that they can use to illustrate to the global market how those new SKUs can be used.

Ensuring Product Integrity: Cleaning and Sanitation Protocols

Will: They have the early adopters, they can begin production, they can start to feed product into the market, they can use the case studies, they can use all sorts of testing and begin larger studies around the product itself and illustrate to the broader market how it performs and how it performs over time. And it really gives them a way to accelerate their penetration of the market and get started with confidence. And the relationships prove very valuable because those early adopters, as, they’re worth a lot more than just the revenue that they offer somebody who wants to put new products into the market.

Ulli: That makes total sense, and I see the value that must create for your clients and the value that is held by you guys as people who are able to see so much of a broader area of the market that allows you to have those oversights and strategies for them. That’s really, really awesome.

Will: We’re starting to do something similar now in the peptide space. We have a tremendous amount of interest in bringing our platform technology from the Tesseract Life Sciences side to the peptide category.

And there are so many people who are interested in how they can adopt peptides and use them in their product categories in Nutra and other spaces. That we’re seeing the early stages, the infancy of becoming an epicenter there because of our enabling technologies for biotechnology and absorption. And so that pattern very much continues there, both for strategy and execution in the market.

Ulli: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and I feel like there’s obviously so much value there. And I feel like so much of this is so dependent on the fact that you guys do have such a unique technology to work with and a precise technology to work with, but without getting too far into that I think we did we covered a lot of ground today we went over some really great questions we flew through them but I think that’s it for me unless you guys have more to add with any of these topics specifically

Hendrik: No, I think it was a great session

Will: No, I think that’s very comprehensive.

I enjoyed it. Thanks to Hendrik for his depth of technical knowledge. After, I think, I’d argue that no one in the industry has Hendrik Grobler’s depth of knowledge on what this particular technology can do. And after almost a decade of helping Tesseract Life Sciences do it, particularly with cyclodextrins, once again, this is a marriage between the Tesseract Life Sciences platform technology and the dynamic atomization that Advanced Powder Dynamics has that goes back really since 2017. And there’s a synergy between the two that Hendrick has seen more than anyone outside of myself and my business partner, Al Zapp, that is really transformative here for what we can do for nutrients and drawing. It’s understandable that he has so much to say.

Hendrik: It’s always a pleasure.

Ulli: Well, thank you guys. I’m going to end it here and we’ll be on again soon.

Will: Pleasure we appreciate your guidance thank you steven bye