Popcorn is generally very hygroscopic.
Therefore, often in popcorn factories or in gourmet popcorn stores, businessmen ask: "Why does popcorn become chewy?" It is necessary to conditioning the room, and control the temperature and humidity. Then the popcorn will remain crispy and delicious!
Here are the questions a factory owner should answer:
What is the indoor humidity?
What is their indoor temperature?
Are there doors that often open to the outside?
Are there exhaust hoods that remove excess heat and moisture outside?
There is an interesting feature of the behavior of popcorn when cooling. At the end of the process of popping in the Robopop, the humidity of the popcorn is usually excessive. As it cools, popcorn loses moisture - the target percentage is 2%. It usually takes a few minutes for the popcorn to cool and become crispier. Sometimes customers take popcorn for further action right after the Robopop, so it's still didn't lose moisture.
Therefore, often in popcorn factories or in gourmet popcorn stores, businessmen ask: "Why does popcorn become chewy?" It is necessary to conditioning the room, and control the temperature and humidity. Then the popcorn will remain crispy and delicious!
Here are the questions a factory owner should answer:
What is the indoor humidity?
What is their indoor temperature?
Are there doors that often open to the outside?
Are there exhaust hoods that remove excess heat and moisture outside?
There is an interesting feature of the behavior of popcorn when cooling. At the end of the process of popping in the Robopop, the humidity of the popcorn is usually excessive. As it cools, popcorn loses moisture - the target percentage is 2%. It usually takes a few minutes for the popcorn to cool and become crispier. Sometimes customers take popcorn for further action right after the Robopop, so it's still didn't lose moisture.
However, as soon as the difference between the temperature of the popcorn and the ambient temperature becomes less than 11 °C, the popcorn begins to take moisture from the air.
Those it must be ensured that the popcorn has enough time to cool down, but after that, it must be isolated from the open air - closed in containers or further processed.
During the operation of the popcorn machine, a lot of warm and humid air comes out of it, which must be removed immediately. Therefore, the instruction requires the installation of exhaust ventilation above the sifter outlet. In the appendix, there is a visual material on how the hood affects the air humidity.
You can, of course, use a popcorn warmer (and this is generally its main function - to warm popcorn, reduce its moisture and make it crispy). But with large production volumes (hundreds of pounds an hour), this may not be very convenient. It is necessary to provide an indoor climate, especially in the tropics area or near the sea, lakes, oceans.
Relative humidity (RH) value is important for popcorn production. Exhausting ventilation helps to keep RH value on optimal level, even if the production room is being affected by outdoor humid air. For example, exhausting ventilation has been installed in a production room with three Grand Robopop 220 machines and a caramel coating line (up to 500 kg/h production rate). Accordingly to the Grand Robopop operation manual, it is required to arrange a ventilation hood rated not less than 2500 m 3 /h per each machine. Relative humidity measurements were being taken each day, twice a day, morning and evening for few weeks. The results are represented on the picture below. Despite of RH variations caused by natural outdoor air, average RH rate has been reduced once exhausting hood is installed:
