Design and Development of a Weaning Food Processing Equipment for use at Institutional level

Preparing paste from cereal, pulses, fruits and vegetable is the most important operation in the process of preparing home made weaning foods. At present, there is no specially designed equipment for processing home made weaning foods for use at institutional level. Hence, the conventional and alternative methods and equipments have to be used for processing weaning foods. These methods besides being time consuming, laborious and inefficient, the product is poor in quality without making required particle sizes for weaning baby and moreover contamination of foods may also occur. Therefore a hand operated weaning food processing equipment was designed and developed for processing home made weaning foods for use at institutional level.

The performance of the developed weaning food processing equipment was evaluated at different batch sizes. It was found that the average time for processing a batch (4kg) was estimated to be about 8.47min. The extraction efficiency of the developed equipment was found between 92.53 and 94.48 per cent. The average power requirement of the developed weaning food processing equipment has been observed to be about 0.073W, when equipment was operated with batch of 4kg at a time. The average moisture content, density and viscosity for the weaning paste produce with the developed equipment were found to be 81.5 per cent, 1030 kg/m³

and 4.431 Pa.s respectively.