The egg is located second from the top of the food pyramid, a daily serving of egg is helpful for the human body. Egg powder is dried egg product with a similar texture to milk powder. It still retains fresh egg’s most nutrients such as calcium, protein, minerals(potassium and sodium), and it has the added advantages of improving food consistency, thickening, and chewiness. For example, in the kitchen, it can be directly used in powder form when baking or could be stirred in water to make it reconstituted and used as a beaten egg. In the food industry, egg powder is used to make biscuit, egg noodles or puffed snacks.
In addition to the field of food, egg powder’s extracts like lysozyme from egg white and Immunoglobulin Y from egg yolk have been applied in the pharmaceutical field for inhibiting bacterial activity and enhance the immune system. All in all, egg powder is versatile as baking material, fresh egg cuisine substitute, puffed snack addition, medicinal ingredient and etc.

egg

I. Egg Powder Types

For worldwide customers, the commonly used variety is chicken egg powder, duck egg powder, and quail egg powder. And these egg powders can be divided into three types by its composition:

Powdered whole egg
Powdered whole egg shall consist of both egg white and yolk, it is suitable for cooking omelets, scrambled eggs, pancakes and custards. What’s more, whole egg powder can be directly mixed with milk, cream, sugar and alcoholic spirits like brandy or rum to make eggnog, the egg powder gives a frothy texture to this protein drink.
Powdered egg white
Powdered egg white contains only egg albumen. Firstly, it can be directly used without re-hydration in baking meringue or royal icing for making cakes. Secondly, it could be re-hydrated & whipped into the bubble to cook some modernist cuisine. Please note, egg white powder need to be reconstituted in water at the ratio of 1 : 1.5, after re-hydration it could be substituted for the fresh egg white. When comparing with fresh egg white, powdered egg white has the advantages of long shelf life, less storage & transportation space and not fragile ability.
Powdered egg yolk
Egg yolk powder is made of spray dried pasteurized egg yolks. It is rich in lecithin and a good emulsifier. Egg yolk powder can be used as a substitute for the fresh egg yolk to obtain color, texture, and emulsion capacity and is most frequently used in mayonnaise, dressings, sauces, and croissants. Dried egg yolks can be stored at room temperature.
Powdered egg mix
Powdered egg mix is whole egg powder mixing with milk powder and vegetable powder, this powder mixture has a better balance in nutrition because vegetable powder can add more vitamin to the original protein, calcium nutrients. And it’s a nice material to cook a scrambled egg or French toast as a quick breakfast.

II. Egg Powder Making Methods

In recent decades, more and more people focus on food quality and health problems, the technology of making egg powder has been improved a lot that can meet customer’s demand for poultry egg throughout the year even in remote areas. Therefore, egg powder manufacturing has become a considerable part in poultry production.

In the food processing industry, the common egg powder manufacturing includes the process of material selecting→egg breaking & shell removing→mixture filtering→pasteurization→storage & drying→packing.

egg powder manufacturing process

1. Material selecting: cleaning & candling

For material choosing, you can buy fresh eggs from a large poultry farm. The freshness can be tested by water, the fresh egg will be dipped in the water while the rotten egg will start rising and floating on the surface of the water. Then, dirt on eggs can be cleaned by egg washing machine with a nylon brush or stainless steel wire ball brush to avoid any pollution. The rotten eggs could be removed by candling, a method by using a light source behind eggs to check inside the egg.

2. Egg breaking & shell removing

The selected eggs are carefully broken and deshelled, the separated eggshells could be collected to make animal fodder or plant fertilizer. Egg breaking can be completed manually or by egg breaking and separating machines that can collect eggs liquid & separate yolks from whites efficiently which is suitable for small and medium egg processing factory to produce particular products like egg whites powder.

3. Mixture filtering

After breaking, the egg liquid will be filtered through a porous sheet to remove membranes & shell pieces and collected by a container.

4. Pasteurization

Pasteurization is the necessary step that can kill most of the salmonella in eggs, the egg liquid should be pasteurized at 60-65℃ for 3-5 minutes.

5. Storage & drying

Then the pure egg liquid will be pumped into a storing silo at low temperature to retain freshness and prepare to be dried.

5.1 The common egg powder drying methods are spray drying and freeze-drying.

A. Powder spray drying machine’s work principle is by rotating & atomizing the egg liquid into the slim droplet and dehydrating the moisture of the droplet by a stream of hot air to get egg powder. This method can make egg’s moisture fully contacted with hot air, the egg liquid will be in the powdery form in a relatively short time.
The air will be heated at 150-200℃ and then rotated into the distributor, and the outlet air is in 80-100℃.
The final moisture of egg powder can be reduced to 3-5%.

B. Freeze-drying is by freezing the egg liquid into the crystallized form below zero temperature and then the moisture in the crystallized egg will be sublimated directly into vapor under vacuum. Finally, the vapor will be removed by condenser and egg liquid get dehydrated.
The material needs to be prefrozen at -20℃ for 2 hours, then it is freeze-dried at -45℃ for one day under vacuum.
Under low temperature & low pressure, the egg’s protein won’t be inactive or oxidized, which is suitable for drying heat-sensitive biological material.

5.2 Two drying results comparison

The spray drying is high-temperature food dehydrating method in a short time, while freeze-drying is by low temperature & low pressure to sublimate and remove egg’s moisture. From the results, products dried by two methods have different physical and chemical properties:
(1) In spray drying, material’s volume can be largely reduced, normally reduced by 60-70%. While in freeze-drying, there’s almost no material loss and thus its volume is nearly unchanged.
(2) They are different in structure, spray drying dehydrates moisture from slim droplet and freeze-drying dehydrates moisture from the porous crystal structure. Therefore, spray dried powder has more uniform particles and a better flow property but freeze-dried powder has a better reconstitution.
(3) Two kinds of dried powder both show a trend of rising-then-falling when foaming, the freeze-dried powder has a higher foaming ability & foam stability than spray dried powder.
(4) Freeze-drying is higher-priced than spray drying. Both of their dehydrated egg powder has a similar moisture content of 3-5% and freeze-dried products need to be ground since its crystal structure while spray drying needn’t. Actually, freeze drying technology is normally applied in pharmaceutical and chemical fields, spray drying is largely used in food and industry manufacturing.
After drying, industrial egg powder will be packed, labeled and through sampling tested, after that, the qualified product will be sold in the local market or exported abroad.

III. Egg Powder Investment Opportunity

egg powder market

As one of the common egg preserving methods, egg powder drying solves raw eggs’ transportation difficulty of fragility and extend its shelf life, spray drying also solve egg’s health problem like salmonella. According to statistics, egg powder is normally manufactured in USA, UK, India, Japan with other egg processing products like the pasteurized egg in annual production of 0.75 million MT. Here are a few investment references for egg powder:
In some religious country such as Pakistan and India, they will choose poultry products instead of pork because of their religious culture. In India, it’s reported that Indian’s demand for egg powder is about 2300MT annually with a growth rate of 15-30%. India also has a cheap labor force which is suitable for egg’s industrialized manufacturing.
In the developed country, although their raw egg’s production quantity is limited, almost 20-25% of raw eggs will be processed through pasteurized, dehydrated. The trend in egg powder application will be focused on fodder, food additives, egg yolk products, and eggshell powder production.
In Asia, dried egg’s trade volume has been increased from 34245 MT to 60600 MT in recent years. Japan has a large demand for egg products, it’s estimated that more than half of 120 egg processing plants are in Japan. And most eggs are consumed in egg liquid form by local Japanese while around 20% of raw eggs will be dehydrated. Japan is egg products’ largest import country in Asia, while India is dried eggs’ largest export country and its main buyers are from Japan, Germany, and Denmark. The trend of egg products manufacturing in Asia will be increased since more people will become middle class from poverty and enjoy a more international eating habit and choose more sophisticated egg products like baby food products like Nestle and Cerelac, shampoo manufacturing, sweets, and fast food manufacturing.
In Europe, around 25% of eggs are processed, the volume of the egg processing industry and a variety of egg products are both increasing. For example, the EU is basically self-sufficient in egg products and it exports dried egg yolk to the Far East. In the EU, the strict regulation makes the egg industry continually improves processing ability and sanitary standard. So in Europe, you need to focus more on food safety problem like pasteurization for salmonella and you’d better gain ISO (International Organization for Standardization) certification before starting egg processing business.