Shear and Compression Testing of Breakfast Cereal

Cereal manufacturers use universal testing machines to evaluate their product’s texture in both R&D and quality control environments. The sensory texture, particularly the crunchiness, of cereal plays an important role in the mind of the consumer. Tests are typically performed on dry samples, but product can be conditioned by incremental soak times to determine the degradation rate of crunchiness.

The challenges of this type of testing:

• Fixturing to ensure repeatable and reproducible data
• Analyzing “noisy” force curves created by hundreds of breaks of individual cereal pieces

Our solutions:

Fixturing

• We provide the industry recognized Kramer shear cell, a square cell that accommodates five or ten guided blades to compress and shear specimen material in a confined and repeatable space. The Kramer shear cell is used for various food production tests to provide texture analysis.
• A Drip Tray is easily integrated into the system to avoid spillage.

Analyzing “noisy” force curves

• Bluehill^® Universal software can automatically determine average, maximum, and minimum peak/trough values with tunable sensitivity limits.