Even after letting them dry for a sufficient time, once they’re in a pouch or sometimes in a jar, they are losing their stability/melting a bit. Any experts here have any insight?
In my experience - once you put something inside a package it has a tendency to “rehydrate” the outer layers. This often happens with almost everything not just gummies. A coating on the outside which is absorbent can help with this, as can adding a desiccant to the package. There’s a reason you find desiccants in most packages with things that are not 100% dry.
You might also check the moisture content of your gummy - there’s usually a sweet spot for good packaging. And you can actually purchase different kinds of packaging which will allow the extra moisture out. This can be a double edged sword though - solving the “melting” but then reducing the amount of time your product can stay on the shelf before it “dries out” and gets too crunchy.
I’d start by testing for moisture content / water activity. Then ask your packaging supplier what their package is supposed to do (hold moisture in, let it out, they have no idea, etc). Then plan to modify your packaging to improve your shelf stability (that’s what we are talking about after all). Unless you feel comfortable modifying your formulation. Its also possible that even though you are “letting it dry an appropriate time” that where you are has a much higher RH% in the air, if that’s the case you’ll have to let things dry longer.
I use a rule on RH% of between 30-60%. More and everything will take forever to dry. Less and you’ll get a dry outside but still uncured middle. That means when you go into the package, you could still be getting melting.
I hope this helps a bit. Let us know how your project goes.
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Hi, we manufacture gummies and used to have this issue a few years ago. The easiest fix is increasing the amount of pectin then tweaking the additional actives. You should be able to get to a 250F melting point and have solid stability.
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It’s what @Cassin said.
We have been fighting this issue for years. Extending the drying time helps but doesn’t get rid of the issue completely… it sounds like you already know that…
Desiccant packs help. But if those don’t do the trick, you may have to look at your recipe/procedure. Adjust pectin/moisture levels.
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We didn’t have to adjust our recipe at all. We just ended up doing a longer, slower cure so they stabilized. It ended up being 3-4 days at 30-40% humidity before packaging.
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Nice.
We do the same thing. The longer dry/cure helps a LOT.
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Wow what a great response. Going to look into our drying conditions, also trying a new recipe with a higher ratio of sugar to 42DE syrup to see if that helps things. Thanks guys, going to figure this out!
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We ship ours with freezer packs when going to southern / hot states.
We used to do that with our gelatin formulation but this is a totally different stability issue unfortunately
This sounds like a water activity issue.
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Could you not just have a longer cook time to remove excess water in your over all formulation. When I have made gummies in the past we had a few issues with stability in the beginning but a longer cook time seemed to clear that right up. Also adding sugar to the outside could help with this. If you put citric acid into the sugar coating there is a chance that the citric acid will take moisture out of the air and cause the stability of your gummies to decrease. Or that has been the case for me anyway.
Also, I live in Florida so moisture is always an uphill battle but if we can do it here I know it can be done else where. Just going to take some tweaking and dialing in of both process and formulation. Hope you can figure it out!
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What’s a sufficient time? What is your room environment?
I suspect your room environment is not controlled, and “sufficient time” is going to vary tremendously.
You definitely need to adjust your ratios. Less water
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Don’t have a hygrometer in the room but the AC runs quite often and we’re in Southern California in a fairly dry area. There’s zero water in the formulation except to create the gelling phase with the pectin, I suppose that could be reduced a little.
We cook to 290c usually, sometimes higher. That cook process inherently gets rid of a ton of water (steam decreases significantly above 240-250c
Our gummies do not melt and only have a 24 hour drying time. We use a refractometer and cook our mixture to 220f and 80 to 82 brix on the refractometer.
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this is great - you also want to make sure you are measuring the water activity inside the gummy AND make sure you are using an appropriate coating. You cannot use regular citric acid. Note that your specific curing time, temp and RH might be perfect where you are but the OP might not have that dialed in and that it a huge part of the cure time PLUS the size and shape of your gummies has an impact on the curing.
My gummies do not melt or sweat and have been left in a mailbox for 3 months in the FL summer and were fine. If you have melting problems with pectin you either have too much water left in them or didnt use enough pectin.
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we have been utilizing a brix meter while dialing in on our gummy line. currently testing different values in the 80s.
but I’m curious to hear from those using a water activity meter in their process…
who has the experience and / or SOP for proper implementation??
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Water Activity Meters are insanely easy to utilize.
Measure prior to drying, after drying.
Set aside samples to test for stability, test after 1 week, 1 month, 1 year, etc.
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thanks for the response, Phil.
have you personally used a WAM to dial in a gummy / other infused product?
curious if folks are in agreement with the range I’ve seen provided by Melt-to-Make of 0.60-0.63 water activity (note-- I am not using M-t-M kits, just using this as a reference).
hoping to get one ordered to the lab, do you have a recommendation on a specific model?
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