Toll Manufacturing Minute with CPS: Solving Powder Scale-Up Challenges in Food & Beverage

TL; DR: EPISODE OVERVIEW

A formulation checks every box in the lab. It flows, disperses, and blends exactly as designed. Then it moves to production-scale equipment, and something changes: inconsistent texture, flavor that drifts batch to batch, product that will not dissolve the way it did on the bench.

Jen Lepore, CPS Marketing Team Coordinator, sat down with Jen Smith, CPS Director of Quality, to unpack why this happens and what manufacturers can do about it. Here are the key details from the conversation.

It’s Not the Equipment. It's Physics.

Smith's first correction to a common assumption: scale-up failures usually get blamed on equipment size or production volume, but those are symptoms, not root causes.

“Scale up isn't necessarily about making a bigger process. It's about making the bigger process match the small process.”

Powders behave differently once particle interaction, flow characteristics, moisture, heat generation, and residence time shift at higher volumes. Materials dominated by surface effects rather than bulk or mass, including fine, micron-sized particles, are especially sensitive. Pharmaceuticals, certain food additives, and functional powders with sticky or hygroscopic properties fall squarely into that category.

Five Mechanisms Behind Scale Sensitivity

Smith walked through the specific ways scale changes powder behavior:

• Mixing energy and shear. Small-batch mixing is uniform and concentrated. At scale, energy spreads across a larger mass, creating uneven shear histories across the batch, which shows up later as inconsistent dispersion and compressibility.
• Ingredient addition order. Sequence affects how particles interact, especially between large and small particles. Lab-scale teams can often fix a poor mix with more mixing time; at production scale, clumping and caking may not surface until discharge, when it’s much harder to correct.
• Segregation during conveying and packaging. A uniform blend can separate as it moves through the rest of the process, since lighter particles become airborne and heavier ones settle. Left unaddressed, this shows up as inconsistent fill weights, flavor, texture, and even regulatory compliance risk.
• Moisture pickup and caking. Lab environments are tightly controlled for temperature and humidity. Production adds exposure time through holding, transfer, and packaging steps, giving hygroscopic powders more opportunity to pull moisture from the air.
• Lot-to-lot variability. Some variability in particle size and bulk density is expected, but small shifts can amplify at scale, especially with longer dwell times and less controlled conditions.

From Powder Behavior to the Consumer's Experience

For food and beverage manufacturers, these mechanisms translate directly into sensory outcomes. Subtle shifts in particle size distribution affect smoothness, grittiness, and how quickly a product dissolves or hydrates. Poor dispersion at scale can leave a product with pockets of undissolved material, even when the same formulation dissolved cleanly in a lab trial.

Flavor uniformity issues follow the same pattern. Smith noted that inconsistent flavor is rarely a flavor chemistry problem; it is a distribution problem, often traced back to segregation or poor deagglomeration during blending.

Operational symptoms like flowability issues, dusting, and rework are not just inconveniences either; they are early indicators that a process is not behaving as designed, and each one can independently affect finished product quality.

Three Things to Nail Down Before Scaling

• Know your powder. Particle size distribution, bulk density, flowability, and moisture sensitivity should all be understood before scale-up begins.
• Define success criteria upfront. Decide what you are measuring (dissolution, blend uniformity, particle size, yield, throughput) before running the trial, not after.
• Go in to learn, not just to replicate. Treat the pilot trial as a discovery process. The more behavior you understand at pilot scale, the fewer surprises show up at commercial scale.

What CPS Brings to the Table

CPS works across pharmaceutical, food, and industrial powder systems, which gives the team a pattern library for how different materials respond to scale. That cross-sector experience helps identify quickly whether a challenge stems from particle characteristics, process conditions, or downstream handling, then design a stable, repeatable process window before a customer commits to commercial-scale production.

For CPS customers, that translates into:

• Faster root-cause identification when a formulation underperforms at scale
• A validated process window, not just a single set of conditions, for consistent repeat production
• In-house characterization testing when customers lack full data on their own material
• A process bridge between lab formulation and commercial-scale manufacturing

Reach out to the CPS team to talk through your next powder scale-up project. We’ve got the capabilities and expertise that can help your project scale successfully.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Who: Jen Smith, Director of Quality, Custom Processing Services (CPS)
• Topic: Why powders that perform well in the lab often fail at production scale
• Core Message: Scale-up success depends on understanding powder physics upfront, not simply multiplying batch size
• Core Mechanism: Mixing energy and shear, ingredient addition order, segregation, moisture pickup, lot-to-lot variability