Food and Beverage

Robinson Brothers Ltd has been successfully manufacturing products on a toll basis for the Food & Beverage industry since the mid-1990's. Our interest has been focused on the catalytic hydrogenation of naturally occurring raw materials. As such, we have supplied products to the functional food and beverage markets through the catalytic reduction of extracts from plant and wood sources.

A good example of the hydrogenation of a natural product is the conversion of beta-sitosterol to beta-sitostanol, where the sitostanol is used as a cholesterol lowering agent in functional food and drinks.

Our success has been based on considerable process research and development to provide consistent manufacturing processes capable of overcoming the broad variation in quality from one batch of raw material to another. The hydrogenation often needs to be highly selective, reducing an unsaturated site in a particular molecule whilst leaving the rest of the molecular structure intact. Against these technical challenges, we have developed screening techniques to assess the quality of incoming raw materials so that the appropriate manufacturing procedures can be used. We have built a broad depth of knowledge so that we can select specific catalysts to enhance the selectivity of hydrogenation and to use for specific raw material varieties. Our processes have been developed to optimise yields, assay, batch times and right first time quality.

Phytochemistry

We remain very interested in the chemical modification of other naturally occuring raw materials and recent projects have included the production of pharmaceutical materials and the development of pheromone insecticides from plant extracts.

HACCP

RBL manufactures its Food & Beverage products under HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point) protocols. Our HACCP procedures are continually reviewed and verified by both external annual audits and regular audits by customers. To ensure that product failure is always prevented, we use dedicated and fully contained processing equipment to minimise product exposure and avoid cross contamination. We have established procedures to monitor in-coming raw materials, product quality and water supply and our operators are fully trained and issued with comprehensive process directions.