Why Extrude Soybeans
What are the benefits of extruding soybeans? This is a question many people ask me. In order to understand that, I want to give you a little bit of background on the seed itself. Soybeans are one of the most nutritious foods that exist today because of the essential nutrients they contain (36% protein and 18% oil as well as all essential amino acids). Even though they are a great source of amino acids, they cannot be consumed raw. The reason for that is because they also consist of anti-nutritional factors such as trypsin inhibitors, urease and lectins that adversely affect digestive efficiency.
To reduce the anti-nutritional factors to minimum levels acceptable to your livestock, poultry, pet food or aqua species, the soybean needs to be processed. There are several methods to process soybeans that consist of various cooking temperatures. Some examples are listed below:
| Methods of Processing | Cooking Temperature |
| Roasting | 105°C |
| Expander | 100 – 140°C (steam, less friction) |
| Micronization | 180 – 220°C |
| Wet Extrusion | 135 – 140°C (steam, less friction) |
| Solvent Extraction | 105°C |
| Dry Extrusion | 150 – 160°C (friction) |
Utilizing any of the methods above will help with decreasing the levels of anti-nutritional factors, but some are more efficient than others. Insta-Pro developed and patented high shear extrusion in the late 1960’s to provide farmers with the opportunity to obtain the full value of feeding their home grown soybeans to their animals. Based on animal performance data, the benefit of our dry extrusion technique has proven to be the most effective way of processing soybeans to reduce anti-nutritional factors and retain nutrition. Below you can see data that proves that to be true:
There are many factors that go into extruding your soybeans properly such as using the correct temperature, equipment, resources, etc. With proper extrusion of your soybeans, there are multiple additional benefits aside from already reducing anti-nutritional factors such as:
- reducing bitter flavors
- denatures protein
- frees the oil by rupturing plant cell walls
- deactivating fat enzymes to promote stability/ shelf life
When processing soybeans correctly through high shear dry extrusion, you will produce a high-quality end product. To ensure the highest quality ingredients, Insta-Pro offers many resources to our customers such as nutrition support, engineering services, research and development, and service programs. If you are interested in learning more about high shear, dry extrusion or our added resources, send us a message.
