Hello IFSQN team,
We are starting a small ice cream operation and we are using brine cooling in one of our machines to freeze our product. It has always just been an expectation that the brine salt be food-grade. The issue is that food grade costs about 20 times more than non-food grade, so I have been trying to find out what the real difference is between "food-grade" salt and non, other than cost?? I would assume some purity stuff, but I can't figure out specifically what would cause the non-food grade to pose a bigger risk to our product than food-grade.
If any brine gets in to the product/molds, whether it is food-grade or not, that product will be garbage and the molds will need to be rinsed/cleaned, so I'm not really sure what difference the food-grade makes?
Additionally, the way our machine is designed is that there are literally open brine areas at the corners of the machine. Based on how it functions, there is less of a worry of the brine splashing in the molds than product splashing out and contaminating the brine. The brine could possibly get dirty quickly, shortening its effective lifespan; we will skim off the contamination where we can, but eventually we will have to replace it sooner than just the regular life-span of a brine solution. So if we can use the stuff that is 20x cheaper, that would help a lot on cost savings?
Thanks in advance