As with all other foods, the textural properties of grains and snack food is very important. Grains and cereals such as rice and pasta products are always cooked prior to consumption. Therefore not only the product itself need to be the correct texture, but the preparation instruction that accompany the retail packages need to have the correct details for a quality finished product. Snack foods are quite often made from grains and cereals and can be quite complex in their textures. Crispness and crunchiness are frequently desired attributes and if they are missing from the consumers evaluation then the product is often judged to be of poor quality or stale.

Since texture measurements on these properties often require the capture of very quickly occurring changes or “high frequency” responses, the unequalled (16,000 pps) data sampling rate of the TMS-Pro system is a major advantage. Since snack food come in an unlimited number of forms, no single test method works for all products. Some of the most common tests are breaking / bending / snapping with a three point bend fixture, penetrating & puncturing with one of the many probes available and shearing the products with single blade shear designs.

FTC always works closely with each customer BEFORE the sale of any instrument to assure that the product being offered completely solves the unique challenges of every application.

Penetration / Puncture

This technique can be used for hardness testing of many snack foods from cookies to potato chips. The probe is typically inserted into the product until it fractures or breaks through and the peak force is measure along with the distance between contact with the sample and the point of fracture.

Bulk Analysis

This test method is very popular with testing the texture of grains like rice and couscous . Because of the large sample size that the standard CS-1 Kramer Shear Cell can accommodate, testing fast and easy due to a smaller number of replications required. Typically the peak or maximum force incurred during the test is used. The sample is simply loaded by volume or weight and the results are available in seconds. Every major rice processor in North America uses an FTC system of some kind to measure their products consistency.

We even offer a modified version of the Kramer Shear cell ( the Model CS-2) that has thinner blades and smaller grid openings to accommodate the size of smaller grains and cereals. Pasta also lend themselves quite well to Kramer Shear testing. It has been proven many times that the results give excellent correlation to sensor panel interpretations of texture.