VITAMIN A FORTIFIed PEANUT BUTTER - The Official Website of ...

ABSTRACT
Studies were conducted by the Food Development Center (FDC) to improve the existing process
developed by a large company for the vitamin A fortification of its sweet and creamy peanut butter
variant. These were undertaken after verification of the process showed that the vitamin A concentrated
in the area where it was added. The vitamin A recoveries obtained were highly variable ranging from
29.24% to 127.38% with a percent variability of dispersion of 71.32% (FDC, 2006a).
The process used by the company was to directly add the vitamin A fortificant to the peanut butter
after 50% of the total volume of product had been poured into the stainless steel vessel and to add the
remaining 50% volume thereafter.
The first modification carried out to improve the process was to add the vitamin A fortificant four
times, after every 25% of the volume of peanut butter had been poured into the stainless steel vessel. The
ratio of fortificant to peanut butter during each addition was 2.3286 g vitamin A palmitate in oil for every
volume of about 39 kg of peanut butter. This modification led to better dispersion of the vitamin A. The
percent variability of dispersion was reduced from 71.32% for the original company process to 5.34%.
The actual recovery of the fortificant however was low and ranged from 29.95% to 33.32%.
Attempts were made to increase vitamin A recovery by changing the point of addition of the
fortificant from the stainless steel vessel located prior to the 2 nd grinding step to two other vessels located
after the grinding step in consideration of the possibility that heat generated during grinding might affect
vitamin A stability. Thus, the fortificant was added at (1) the cooling tank and (2) the filler tank. The
mixing time was also varied from 5 to 10 min.
Addition of the fortificant at the cooling tank after the 2 nd grinding step and increasing the mixing
time to 10 min, increased vitamin A recovery slightly to 50.89%. However, the fortificant appeared to be
well dispersed as the variability of dispersion of vitamin A remained low at 3.43%. Another trial showed
higher vitamin A recoveries of 82.03% and 93.21% and a percent variability of dispersion of 6.54%
(FDC, 2006c) which however could not be reproduced in succeeding trials. Validation studies showed
vitamin A recoveries of 39.37% to 42.37% for Trial 1 and 35.38% to 39.90% for Trial 2 and percent
variability of 3.87% and 6.90% (FDC, 2006e). The product temperature at the cooling tank was 55 –
65 o C. This was lower than the product temperature at the original point of addition of fortificant at the
stainless steel vessel prior to the grinding step which ranged from 81.5 o C to 82.1 o C.
Addition of the fortificant to the filler tank resulted in a high variability of dispersion of the
vitamin A of 19.88%. The poor dispersion was also reflected in abnormally high vitamin A recoveries of
111.76% to 162.5%. It was noted that the filler tank mixer did not reach the bottom of the vessel as a
result of which, the initial volume of product which flowed to the bottom of the tank had to be manually
mixed (FDC, 2006d).
Although the desired vitamin A recovery was not obtained in this study, it showed that in
carrying out the process, the ratio of fortificant to product volume should be kept as small as possible, the
point of addition of the fortificant should carefully consider product temperature and the appropriateness
of the mixer desing should be evaluated.
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