Fibre
Fibres are very much recognised as an essential nutrient offering distinctive health benefits. Ingetecsa started drying fibres more than 50 years ago and we have become an experienced partner in this field.
For us it started decades ago with the long fibres from the de-watered sugar beet pulp. Since then, the variety of different fibres we have dried over the last fifty years is immense.
No longer are fibres a waste product or destined to become an animal feed.
Today, everybody recognises fibres as a valuable ingredient. For long their benefits have been underestimated and now their range of applications is growing constantly.
Fibre classification
Commonly, the term fibre refers to all parts of plant-based foods that the body does not digest or absorb. Unlike other nutrients, enzymes of the stomach and of the small intestine don’t attacked fibres so these reach the colon un-degraded.
Used in applications, fibres have a range of different capacities, such as viscosity controller (thickener), fat binding capacity, gel forming capacity, texturing capacity. The most important property of a fibre is its ability to bind water, the water holding capacity (WHC). Fibres can hold large amounts of water.
Splitting the various fibres in two groups is practical: