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Hand whisk (or kitchen mixer) VS industrial brushless mixer at 5000 rpm
Hello everyone,
I noticed that there is a huge gap between our tools available in our kitchens and those used by the cosmetics industry.
For example, in a homemade recipe (a butter for the face and body consisting of rice starch, coconut oil, grape seed oil, beeswax, shea butter and other essential oils), I simply stir the mixture by hand in the water bath with a whisk.
Now, a Japanese cosmetic company uses the same recipe with exactly the same ingredients, but they use an industrial brushless mixer at 5000 rpm to mix it for 1 hour !!?? I feel a little silly with my small whisk in my kitchen. And even at very low speed, I could not do that for 60 minutes, I’ll break my wrist.
I wonder about the difference between mixing by hand and mixing with an industrial over the top super machine. According to your knowledge and experience, could you tell me if the method will have significant results on the properties of the butter or these Japanese just love to use a missile to kill a mosquito?
Thank you for enlighten me.
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6 Replies
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A rocket for a mosquito
) I guess the answer lies in checking the structure and feel of the recipe you made and the one available from the ‘rocket’ company. That would give you a pretty fair idea about the significance of the mixing duration. -
Forgive me for veering off into chemical engineering for a bit…
@Nick_Truman, what you are describing is actually a classic scale-up problem. What’s confused you is that a piece of information got left out of the info from the Japanese company - and that was the size of the batch that they typically make.Think about this - having to use a hand whisk, my educated guess is that you are making between 500 - 1,000 grams of butter, at most, stirring for about 10 minutes. So, what would you do if you had to make 500,000 grams? Well, one thing you could do is hire 1,000 people who each made a 500 gram batch with a hand whisk. That doesn’t seem like a cost-effective solution.Ideally, you’d want to make your 500,000 gram (500kg) batch all at once, and you are going to need a machine big enough and powerful enough to move a fairly large amount of material around. But…machines that big cost a whole lot of money, and the bigger they are, the more money they cost. If we were trying to exactly duplicate your lab process, we would have to buy a machine big and powerful enough to make a batch in 10 minutes - and this would be a very expensive machine. Fortunately, you can substitute faster mixing speed, and longer batch mixing times, to allow you to use a much smaller (and therefore cheaper) machine yet still get the same end result in your product. It sounds like overkill - until you realize the scale of the problem. -
Wonderful response, Bob!
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Thank you very much sir, your explanations are very clear and logical. Do you teach? You have the talent for it.
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Bobzchemist’s response now makes all the formulae I’ve seen here & there on various chemical companies’ web-sites make sense regarding the equipment used. Thanks for the words.
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Thank you so much, Bob. Your explanation was a true “aha” moment for me. I always look forward to your insights in these discussions.
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