Food Cryogenics
High performance cryogenic solutions for high quality food preservation
Food cryogenics offers unparalleled cooling power. This process is essential if you want to preserve the initial taste and nutritional qualities of food, improve its manufacturing process or transport at a controlled temperature. This technique is suitable for all types of food, from the most fragile to the most exotic.
What is a key priority for your operations?
Get in touch with our team to discuss more about how our products and services can support you.
Quality
Perfect results in record time: Cooling or cryogenic freezing takes place particularly quickly, perfectly preserving the taste and the freshness of food.
Flexibility
Multifunctional and compact: the same cryogenic equipment can cool, freeze and harden a surface, thus ensuring optimal flexibility of your production line.
Productivity
Food grade cryogenics allows continuous adjustment of cooling capacity, reduced water loss and up to 10 times faster product processing time. You can run your equipment continuously at the nominal flow rate, while perfectly preserving your product quality.
Performance
Save time: Combine cryogenic refrigeration with mechanical refrigeration for even faster cooling and freezing.
Freezing and Chilling
Cryogenic food freezing (cryo preserve) offers you the opportunity to optimise your process, quick freezing your IQF foods (also known as individually quick freezing), thanks to the iqf technology, cooling capacity and very low temperatures of cryogenic liquids. And we offer food grade N₂ and CO₂ to meet current food safety requirements and regulations.
Temperature Control
Nexelia for Temperature Control is an all-in-one gas solution that combines the best of Air Liquide’s ALIGAL™ gases, application equipment, and technical support service along with a customized Performance Monitoring Service program for the optimisation of your cryogenic process. This offer has been designed for those food manufacture that need to achieve a competitive chilling cost for their food processing and products. With Nexelia™, we define the results together and then commit to delivering on our performance.
In addition to maintaining product quality, refrigeration and temperature control operations make it possible to optimise industrial processes and handle complex products.
| Operation | Role of the cryogenic process | Examples | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hash | Compensate for heat input due to mechanical effects in mixers, mincers, cutters, etc. | Meat, processed poultry. | ||||||
| Grinding | Control the particle size of the powders and reduce clogging of the grinders. | Spices, fats, vegetables seeds. | ||||||
| Slicing | Freezing of soft products to obtain a clean and fine slice | Fish, ham, creamy biscuits and terrines | ||||||
| Grating | Control the temperature when grating or cutting products in to cubes. Avoid caking and condensation phenomena inside the bags. |
Grated or diced cheese. | ||||||
| Kneading | Compensate for heat input due to mechanical effects in the mixers. | Bakery products, fresh pasta. | ||||||
| Mixing | Ensure the homogenity of the mixtures Limit microbiological development. |
Processed meats and poultry | ||||||
| Forming | Shape retention by hardening a surface | Ice creams, extruded vegetable proteins. | ||||||
| Coating | Limitation of the phenomena of diffusion of coating components towards the product |
Fried meat or vegetables. | ||||||
| Heat treatment | Cooling of the product before packaging to save time and/or space on the production line | Cooked meals, vegetable proteins. Cakes, pastries and baked goods. |
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| Dosage | Control the flow of products without sticking or caking | Mix of vegetables, powders, ingredients. | ||||||
Case Study: IQF Cooked, Sliced Poultry Products
Optimise the temperature control process to achieve a LIN consumption objective of 0.5 kg/kg in a new mixer for blending poultry meat for forming chicken nuggets.
| Performance Monitoring Service |
Issues | Optimisation | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Recipe Set-up | Operators were manually changing the chilling parameters- no records | Set up chilling recipes for each product for operational consistency. | ||||||
| Training | Minimal Safety & Operator Training without any documentation | Customized Safety & Operational Training of operators on the cryogenic injection system. | ||||||
| Process Audit | Changes made to original operating parameters without documentation | Reviewed process and made recommendations to improve chilling time. | ||||||
| Gas Installation & Application Audit | Issues with performance of exhaust system design and reliability of cryogenic valve | Recommendations provided for an improved exhaust system set-up and a more reliable cryogenic proportional valve-documented. | ||||||
| Gas Consumption Optimization | Gas consumption higher than original objective | Cryogen injection sequence optimised to reduce gas consumption. | ||||||
| Follow-up Review | No regular reviews | Review of consumption objective planned annually. | ||||||
Cold Chain Transportation
Cryogenic liquids, CO₂ (often referred to as dry ice) and nitrogen are comparable sources of cold used in controlled atmosphere storage, for deliveries such as vaccine and clinical sample transport. They guarantee the freshness and hygienic quality of the transported products during cold chain logistics or transportation without being dependent on an electrical source, regardless of the mode of transport."
Optimised operating costs
Cryogenic solutions offer an incomparable cold power to weight ratio; you can therefore increase the net payload of your vehicles and their rate of use.
Cryogenics does not necessarily require a refrigerated truck, you can exploit your traditional distribution network and access new markets without specific investment.
Let us assess the best product for your operations
Our experts will help you choose the right gas for your food processing or pharmaceutical operations and give you advice on the use of related equipment. In this way, it is possible to consistently preserve high-quality products in complete safety.
Related Equipment
To support the diversification of the offer in the agri-food sector, Air Liquide has developed innovative cryogenic solutions for freezing all types of food, both solid and liquid.
- Faster, more homogenous chilling,
- Improved cryogen efficiency by up to 50% over top injection.
- Easy retrofit onto many types of food processing equipment.
The Cryo Tunnel series is the ideal solution for the freezing, crust freezing and hardening of any type of food product — even fragile, soft or sticky products — while ensuring exceptional product quality. Enquire with us to find the most ideal option that can help you increase productivity, improve clean-ability plus ease of operation and maintenance, with a minimal capital investment and installation cost.
| Simple and reliable cryogenic freezer cabinets that are easy to use, maintain and clean to freeze, chill and crust food. |
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Industry Leader
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Benefit from our robust production and filling infrastructure, including extensive pipeline networks. -
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