Anti-staining pouch
Ready-made meals and sauces with high fat content and strong colours often have an undesired side effect on the packaging – they leave stains. An attractive appearance and long shelf life are two key factors in convenience food, This new retort packaging ensures the highest barrier properties whilst sustaining opacity and enabling high-quality designs. Pouches have gained more and more importance, as they are convenient, safe and attractive packaging solutions for the food, pet-food and non-food sector. Eye-catching appearances at the point of sale are mandatory to successfully differentiate from competitors on the market. Trendsetting designs nowadays contain widespread white areas or light colours, presenting challenges for retort packaging. An innovative material concept, offers customers excellent barrier and filling properties as well as a stainless appearance of colour-intense products. The growing demands of the convenience food market have triggered several innovations in packaging in recent years. A major advantage of this innovation is that it can be filled and processed in the same way as standard pouches. The special laminate not only guarantees highest safety and mechanical resistance but also offers an additional feature – it ensures the straight and easy tear-away opening of the pouch. The special material structure has excellent barrier properties for instance against oxygen transmission. Throughout the retort process, the laminate retains its attractive appearance and prevents grease stains and discolouring – even with white designs. Thanks to the high opacity an attractive visual appearance is guaranteed during the entire shelf life of the product. The novel material structure also enables a clean and straight tearing of the pouch, which is especially advantageous with sauces. Subsequently, the Anti-Staining-Pouch is the ideal packaging solution for ready-made tomato, curry or chilli dishes with high fat content and intense colours as well as the pet food industry.

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Ready meals
Ready meals
New findings on VivOX 4, an all-natural preservative that is produced and marketed by Vitiva, suggest that effective anti-rancidity protection is conferred for various types of meat-based ready meals. This versatile oil-soluble, water-dispersible formula helps increase shelf life and reduces warmed over flavour (WOF), while retaining the important organoleptic characteristics of the product. Production of meat-based ready meals includes thermal processing that affects the fats present in food and increases their oxidative instability. This instability is even greater when foods are battered and fried, due to oil pick up of fried products such as chicken nuggets, battered fish etc. During cooling, freezing, transportation and warehousing, there is an increased exposure to oxygen and light, which accelerates unwanted changes of ready meals such as rancidity, organoleptics characteristics and appearance of WOF. By adding allergen-free VivOX 4 formula, the shelf life of meat-based ready meals can be extended by 2-5 times in comparison to control samples that utilise traditional synthetic ingredients, while still maintaining the original taste and flavour profile.
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Animal protein
Nölke Pure Ingredients focusses natural animal protein concentrates. The company does not offer its customers “ready-made products”, but emphasises service and a high level of flexibility. All items manufactured at the Versmold site can be customised to meet clients’ individual requirements and specifications. The targeted use of different batches of raw materials for example, influences solubility and amino acid composition; the functionality of individual protein factors is defined by regulating the temperature and pH value. Fresh and natural ingredients are exclusively utilised to produce broths, stocks and extracts. Chicken, turkey and beef, as well as game and fish, provide the raw materials for the variety of choice products manufactured by the company. Production at the Versmold site focusses on wet goods; poultry extracts are also offered in powder form. Approximately 50% of the broths and stocks produced are exported, including halal-certified goods, specifically produced for the Muslim market. Animal protein concentrates are an indispensable ingredient of many convenience products. They are used in all types of ready meals such as soups, sauces, stocks, as well as pasta and pan-fried dishes. As chilled foods and frozen meals have been achieving high levels of sales in recent years, Nölke Pure Ingredients is participating in the high growth of this trend segment by focussing on the product area. The potential for ready meals has not been exploited – by far. The company’s cooperation with industrial customers
constantly opens up new application areas for functional proteins.

Heinrich Nölke GmbH & Co. KG
Versmold, Germany

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Animal fats
Animal fats
Cooking in animal fats is a traditional means of preparing many foods and beef dripping is key to various food applications. Beef dripping is an excellent frying fat with a very long frying life. Rancimate analysis results show that the frying performance of beef dripping is higher than of palm fat and even four times higher than of rapeseed oil. Beef dripping in baked foods improves the texture of rolls through a consistent pore structure as well as a good elasticity. A higher yield can be reached with a lower fat quantity than with butter and baking margarine, while rolls remain good and crispy. Even in instant soups and ready-made meals beef dripping is a superb ingredient for its high temperature resistance and its beef taste.

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