Any bark, fruit, root, or seed (as well as other plant materials) used to color or flavor food during cooking is considered a spice. However, manufacturing herbs differs from how spices are made, as herbs come from plants' flowers, leaves, or stems. While spices are primarily used to flavor food, they can also be used for cosmetics, herbal medicines, perfumes, and religious rituals in the form of incense. Understanding how spices are made is integral for those sourcing spice processing equipment, as spice manufacturing is both a science and an art.

Spice Manufacturing: How Spices Are Made

Spices come in many different forms. They can come as whole, ground, grated, fresh, extracted, dry, crushed or chopped spices, or even tinctures that contain extracted spice. Processing equipment for spice manufacturing can handle these various forms prior to sale. However, spices for food are often altered during meal preparation or even when served, as is the case when diners use a peppercorn grinder to sprinkle bits of the spice over a dish.

Certain types come almost exclusively as ground powders, like turmeric, whereas others like mustard or fennel come either whole or in powdered form. Whole dried spices like peppercorns tend to be less expensive, as they have longer shelf lives. Fresh ginger root or garlic tends to be more expensive due to shorter shelf lives, though both are also available as dried powders. Choosing the best machinery for spice manufacturing depends on the form the finished product will take, so the type of spice processing equipment used may vary considerable, depending on the exact application.

Spice manufacturing systems might include: 

By better understanding how spices are made, manufacturers can recognize what machinery best preserves the flavor and nutritional benefits of essential oils within a spice. Thus, Processing equipment must be efficient and specialized to produce these flavors on an industrial scale.

Stages of Spice Manufacturing

Considering the wide array of different spices and their varied sources, the production phases vary according to the spice. Processing equipment and spice manufacturing techniques will also differ for a variety of reasons. Within these diverse methods of spice processing, equipment will also vary to produce better-quality products. Generally, spice manufacturing will normally follow specific stages, though these may be skipped or altered depending on the type of spice, processing equipment, and end product desired.

Cleaning & Inspection

As with any other agricultural crop, raw spices will inevitably contain impurities like dirt, metal, rocks, stems, stones, string, and other foreign material. To ensure the end product is of sufficiently high quality, spice manufacturing begins with inspecting for and removing these contaminants. Spice manufacturing techniques at this stage often involve air classifiers, aspirators, destoning machinery, dust collectors, magnetic separators, optical sorters, vibratory screeners, and other spice processing equipment for inspecting and removing adulterants from raw spice. Processing equipment must both remove these unwanted materials and preserve a spice’s natural properties.

Drying

Once cleaned, drying is normally the next stage of spice processing. Equipment to remove moisture also adds to the shelf life of a spice. Manufacturing methods for drying don’t always involve spice processing equipment, with certain spices like chilies, coriander seeds, ginger, nutmeg, and turmeric sometimes sun-dried. While this is a much less expensive option, this technique depends on the climate and weather of an area, so dehydration or drying with hot air is more often used for large-scale spice processing. Depending on the throughput and application, equipment for eliminating moisture during spice manufacturing may entail dehydrators, fluidized bed dryers, or rotary dryers.

Roasting

In understanding how spices are made, it’s very important to consider how aromas and flavors are affected by controlled heat beyond simply dehydrating or drying a spice. Processing equipment that roasts spices not only reduces moisture, but also enhances flavor by releasing oils within the spice. Manufacturing of roots and seeds like cumin, fennel, garlic, and sesame often includes roasting, though this isn’t the case with already powdered spices that tend to burn when roasted. Spice processing equipment for this stage may include roasting chambers or rotary drum roasters.

Milling

After drying and/or roasting, some kind of milling machine is often used to reduce spices into granules or finer powders. Spice processing equipment for milling augments a spice's texture and flavor profiles. Manufacturing may involve many types of mills, including lump breakers, hammermills and fine grinders, depending on the desired end result. These mills perform particle reduction tasks during spice processing, with equipment that uses techniques from cryogenic milling to fine grinding.

Blending & Mixing 

Blending and mixing is an important part of spice manufacturing. It’s at this point where it takes an intimate understanding of flavors, which must consider the culinary characteristics of each spice. Precise proportions of spices create harmonious aromas and tastes through blending and mixing during spice processing. Equipment like centrifugal mixers, emulsifiers, ribbon blenders or rotary drum mixers are used to properly distribute flavor profiles within spice mixtures at this stage of spice manufacturing.

Packaging 

With other products, packaging is often considered only an ancillary part of fabrication or processing, though this isn’t the case with spice manufacturing. Packaging helps preserve the aromas, flavors and quality of a spice. Packaging equipment normally also provides detailed information on batches, including the best-before and manufacturing dates, along with the origin of the spice. Manufacturing systems for packaging spice also normally involves equipment that fills, labels, seals, and vacuum packs boxes, bottles, jars, pouches, or other containers.

Spice Processing Equipment from Prater

The engineers who develop equipment and systems for Prater Industries understand how spices are made. Our company manufactures a wide array of products that are ideal for use within spice manufacturing systems. Prater’s durable material processing machinery serves the spice industry with certain key equipment for processing spices in both dried and raw form.

Prater’s spice processing equipment includes: 

  • G-Series Full-Screen Hammer Mill: Featuring a center feed and symmetrical rotors that evenly distribute product across the entire screen, Prater’s G-series hammer mill grinds in a controlled and uniform manner while also allowing for easy maintenance.
  • Mega Mill Hammer Mill: Generating a uniform grind with particle sizes between Prater’s fine grinders and full-screen hammer mills, the Mega Mill enables spice manufacturing on a continuous basis, offering greater airflow and efficiency than our G-series models, with a low maintenance design to keep downtime minimal.
  • M-Series Fine Grinder: Using the principle of impact at high speed, Prater’s M-series fine grinding machines fling product between the rotor blades, where it strikes either sizing jaws or a screen, combining the shear caused by impact with particle-to-particle impact that aids reduction during spice manufacturing.

Not only can Prater’s engineering team integrate our equipment into already existing systems, but we can also provide project management services to put together an entire system for spice processing. Equipment includes process controls and auxiliary devices that make everything work perfectly, along with machinery for grinding, metering, milling, and product sifting, all of which can be assessed in our state-of-the-art testing facility. To learn more about Prater’s spice processing equipment and other machinery we make to aid with spice manufacturing, contact the material handling experts at Prater today.

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