Complete, pre or concentrated mixes?

Mixes are being sold in different ways: a complete mix (just add water), a premix (add egg, fat, sometimes part of flour and part of sugar) or a concentrate mix (everything needs to be added, except the ‘chemicals’). Which type of mix to buy (if you want this) is given by several factors:

•           Are there special requirements to e.g. flour, certain improvers, enzymes, chemicals)
•           Is the volume low or high
•           Availability of certain materials in the country (or nowadays even in general) 

If the volumes is low and ingredients to be used are rare it is quite normal to buy a mix that is as complete as possible: it will prevent risks of mistakes as your time might as well not have sufficient amount of experience; so consistency will automatically be better. However this same complete mix might be sold to your competitor as well, so it will be hard to differentiate and create more unique propositions.

With a higher volume or a good availability of most ingredients one can choose for a premix; e.g. most of the sugar and flour have been taken out. Where in a complete mix perhaps 4 sacks where used, here 1 sack would be used and the other ‘missing’ sacks are added by simply the missing flour, sugar, fat and/ or eggs/ milk. One of the advantages is that one can differentiate a bit more by changing proportions or process conditions, however it requires more skilled bakers at your production line or in the team of technologists to understand and adapt.

Companies that already work with single ingredients, but by manual and not automatic weighing are often faced with mistakes due to inaccuracies or different sourcing of (on paper/ by analysis) the same materials. This can be a reason for them to switch to either a personalised premix or a concentrate if automation is a challenge. A concentrate contains predominantly only functional ingredients (e.g. chemicals, enzymes, powdered emulsifiers, hydrocolloids, etc) with a minimal amount of ‘carrier’ to prevent ‘unmixing’. We are very often looking at ranges of grammages in stead of kilo’s, which is a challenge for some to be so accurate as well as there might be up to 15 or 20 ingredients to be weighed so it can also be time consuming. Lastly it can also be a means of protecting your ‘recipe’ to be easily copied by one of your competitors.

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