Do you know what is gelatin and how to produce it?

What is gelatin? You may not know it, but you must see gummy, yogurt or capsule, which all have gelatin in it. Gelatin can be a food ingredient, a food additive or pharmaceutical excipients, which makes gelatin versatile biopolymers. So gelatin can be used not only in the food industry, pharmaceutical area, even technical products.

Gelatin is a protein chemically, which extracted from collagen riched material, like animal skin or bone. In the modern gelatin industry, the most material used is pigskin, bovine bone and beef hide. You can also see the material, like fish skin or scale which is a niche market.

Gelatin has a long history. Thousands of years ago, the ancients used animal tissue to make glue. So the gelatin began with glue. Even now, the match uses gelatin.

The gelatin is from collagen. Collagen is a protein from animal tissue, like skin or bone. There is many types of collagen. The type I and II have the dominant role in all collagen. Type I can be found in skin, bone and tender. Type II can be found in cartilage. Collagen is not soluble in water usually, while gelatin is soluble.

What happened from collagen to gelatin? In the production of gelatin, pre-treatment of the raw material with dilute acid or alkali results in partial cleavage of the cross-links in collagen; the structure is broken down to such an extent that “warm water-soluble collagen”, i.e. gelatin, is formed. Sometimes, the enzyme may also be used in hydrolyzing the collagen. After the pre-treatment, the raw material was extracted by hot water. A series of extraction are made with different temperature, from 50 to 100℃. With the pre-treatment and extraction, the collagen turned into a mixture of polypeptide chains with different molecular weights. Generally, the first extraction made is high-quality gelatin with good color, bloom or viscosity. The gelatin solution are continuously concentrated filter, sterilization. Finally, the gelatin solution is cooled to make a noodle-like gel.

The gel fed onto the drying room to make dried noodles. Th dried noodle is crushed and milled to the required mesh. Till now, what we got called intermediate. We always blend different intermediates to make the final products under the customer’s requirements.