Quality factors of Margarine

Hello everyone. Firstly, let me introduce myself. My name is Ibon and I work in dairy company at the R&D department. I'm looking forward to learning from everyone here and I hope I will be able to share some as well

I´d be very grateful if you can advice or give some recommendations about:

• In butter is very common to rework and repack, but I don´t know in margarine. Do you think it´s possible?
• It´s necessary an special recipe: minimum amount of fat, avoid dairy ingredients…?

• Would be possible to keep the margarine/low spreads at room temperature during the shelf-life?

Thanks in advance

Greetings AlonsoOlaso,

• You can rework margarine as there are complete factory lines that return "defective" (not unsafe products, eg it could be due to incomplete packaging) products back to the initial tank.
• Margarine according to Food & Drinks Code must have a minimum of 80% fat and can be made from plant or/and animal fats, assuming you have the correct ingredients labelling of course. However, you can make margarines with different fat content but the correct labelling of the product must be applied, eg according to danish law if you produce margarine with fat content of 39-41% it's stated as margarine 40 or in some other countries its called semi-margarine (not a very fancy way to call it !!!).
• You can keep them at room temperature but it can possibly reduce their shelf-life significantly. Even more so once they are bought, cause lets face it, consumers don't always follow the storage instructions, even the simple ones like keep at dark and dry place.

Hope it helps,

Kind regards.

Many thanks Evans X.

Let me explain more details.

The idea is buy margarine or low spreads in blocks (10-25kgrs), send to another country (refrigerated or room temperarure) and pack margarine or low spreads there. Do you think it´s posible? I´m worried abouy microbiology due to changes in wáter drop distribution.

We can not rework the margarine because we don´t produce in the place. the idea is use an equipment similar to use in butter reworking (auger) and a filling machine.

I hope it´s more clear now

Thanks again

I think there are a lot of things that could go wrong and you would need a really high amount of hygiene to perform this. Transportation and simple rework without at least a re-pateurization step could indeed lead to high amount of microbiological contamination or cross-contamination for that matter, let alone the whole process happening in room temperature.

If you can back it up by having microbiological analysis to the "raw" material and the end product to see the microbiological content at the start and the end and how different transportation conditions might affect it you can't safely assume IMO that all will go well. And you would need quite a few different samples not just a single one and not from one transportation to produce safe results. Then again i think it will be costly to do all this for something that i believe is bound to go wrong at some point  :unsure:

More opinions on this would be great.