History of Extruder in Food Industry

Extrusion cooking is used today to process a variety of foods and feeds. Ingredients in a powder or granular form are added to the extruder at the feed end, then transported along the length of the barrel by one or two screws.

The single screw as an ‘extrusion apparatus’ was developed in the second half of the 19th century and was used intensively in industrial and heavy engineering applications.

History shows that the first application of the use of a cooking extruder in the food industry was in producing an expanded cornmeal based snack in the mid 1940s on a single screw extruder.

Mostly likely, this was either an expanded yellow cornmeal ball or curl that was then coated with some type of seasoning such as cheese and salt.

The process of extrusion was perfected in the 1950s and this led to a significant breakthrough for producers of dry foods.

Extrusion involves first mixing all the ingredients and then rapidly cooking the mixture and forcing it through a specialized pressure cooker.

This is very similar to some of the products still offered by today by many snack producers.

The barrier flight extruder screw is a different type of single-screw that was introduced by Mailefer in 1959. The operating principle s of this screw are base on separating the melt phase from the sold phase.

Currently, there are more single than twin screw extruders in use in the food industry. The main reason for this is that they have been around longer than twin screw extruders.

Single-screw extruder were first used in food industry in the 1940s, which twin screw extruders were not developed for the food industry until the early 1980s.

However, twin-screw extruders are rapidly becoming the extruders of choice in the food industry. Basically the fact is that twin-screw extruders have more versatility than single screw extruders.
History of Extruder in Food Industry