Cost Benefits and Reduced Safety Risk

If you currently use chickpeas in your products, then most likely you open cans or soak and boil dry beans.  If you don't currently enjoy the benefits of chickpeas in your products but want to The Whole Bean offers a cost effective way to include this nutritional super food in your product formulas.

No cleaning ... no soaking ... no boiling ... no can opening ... no waste water ... no chance of introducing environmental microbes with a wet cooking process. With our flour you have a clean, dry processing environment until its time to mix in other ingredients. Microbial risk is lowered, processing costs are reduced, and the environmental benefits of less energy use and no waste water are obvious.

The Cost and Hazards of Can Opening:   When you buy and use canned chickpeas, you pay for the beans and the brine water.  You pay for the labor to open the cans and then the cost of disposing the can and its waste water.  You spend more on freight, labor, safety challenges, disposal, and the microbial risk of processing a wet ingredient.

When you use chickpea flour from the Whole Bean those costs are eliminated.  Here is a simple comparative analysis.

In order to make bean puree with the Whole Bean flour, mix one part flour by weight with four parts water by weight. The cost of the added water is essentially free because you use your own.   

1. When you purchase Whole Bean flour in volume quantities it translates into about $0.22/lb of cooked hydrated chickpeas.
2. Our customers typically pay approximately $0.44/lb for cooked canned chickpeas.
3. This is a 50% raw material savings alone.
4. Add the additional savings from freight, labor, water and trash disposal, safety risk management, etc ... and we believe that switching from a can opening operation to one utilizing Whole Bean Garbanzo RTE Nutrition flour will result in a savings to the operation of over 60%.

Food Safety: Hummus has been rocked by listeria recalls and processors must be concerned with controlling the growth of bacteria, yeast, molds and other pathogens. A company which does not minimize its food safety risk gambles with the health of its customers and with its own ultimate survival.

A cooking process that requires wet soaking and cooking of the chickpeas introduces considerable risk of picking up microbial contamination from the environment and excessive growth of natural pathogens. The above process introduces risks of excessive bacterial counts growing in the wet product prior to cooking, in the product after cooling, and importantly on any wet surface or drain in the production facility.  All wet environments require the addition of significant  preservatives to prevent these pathogens from multiplying further.  Even more, minimizing the level of bacteria present in the product during processing requires meticulous sanitation requirements, heavy chemical use during cleaning of the equipment and constant personnel training, not to mention the excessive cleaning water usage.

The Whole Bean’s RTE Garbanzo flour has been found to contain less than 10 cfu/g of yeast, mold and staphylococcus aureus. No trace of E. coli, Listeria spp, or salmonella is detected in our National Food Lab Analysis.  Our product has an Aerobic Plate Count of less than 100 cfu/g and benefits from an extremely low water activity of 0.113.

Fewer wet handling and processing steps reduce the chance of Listeria or other pathogens reproducing in floor drains or on various pieces of equipment. Creating a dry processing environment using such a clean raw material input as The Whole Bean’s flour reduces the processors microbial risk and enhances food safety.  And all these steps help reduce operating costs.

Put simply, preserving a completely dry processing environment until the last mixing step eliminates spaces where Listeria can multiply. This can reduce or eliminate the need for a heat pasteurization kill step or preservatives and save money. 

Even kill steps and/or preservatives will only eliminate a percentage of the microbes present. It follows that fewer bugs present going into the kill step results in fewer coming out and better safety.  Killing 99% of 10,000 microbes results in 100 left to multiply.  But killing 99% of 100 microbes results in only 1 left to multiply.  Using our clean powder will result in fewer microbes present and improved safety.

Shelf Life: The short shelf life of fresh hummus creates significant distribution challenges for large producers. It follows that steps which can increase shelf life create greater opportunities for larger distribution and higher profits.

But preserving a dry processing environment and utilizing our clean garbanzo bean ingredient reduces the microbial risk and count present in the final packaged product. This reduced microbial count results in a product with a longer shelf life.  Extend shelf life by using the Whole Bean's RTE Garbanzo Nutrition flour instead of filling products with preservatives or using expensive pasteurization steps.

Using the Whole Bean's flour will result in fewer microbes present in the final package and longer shelf life.

Expand without significant capital requirements: Sophisticated lines of food processing equipment require capital expenditures in the millions of dollars. However, a manufacturing process utilizing our dry chickpea flour may require only an industrial mixer instead of a factory full of cleaning, soaking, and cooking equipment.

Both large and small operations can easily expand or contract their operation without the huge capital expenditures that are required to purchase and install large equipment lines.  Further, more production throughput can be accomplished in much less factory space than alternative production methods.

Cost Efficiency: Wet cleaning, soaking and cooking commercial operations require costly labor, energy use, sanitation chemicals, and equipment maintenance costs. There are also costs associated with managing water use and disposal, costs associated with large amounts of factory space, and costs associated with complex and time consuming cooking processes.

But utilizing our ready to eat dry ingredient eliminates a large percentage of these steps. Utilizing our ingredient may require only the final mixing step without any cleaning, soaking, or cooking.

Better Yields: The Whole Bean’s RTE Garbanzo Nutrition flour is superior at water absorption, emulsification, and foaming capacity/stability. The ability to add more water during the formulation process increases yields as compared to a traditional soaking and cooking commercial operation. Our product's superior emulsification, foaming capacity/stability allows a food company, such as a commercial hummus operation, to experiment with using high speed mixing equipment to blend more air into the hummus during mixing.  The result can be a fluffier, creamier product which is appreciated by the consumer and produces better yields for the food company.

Food companies finally have the opportunity to use chickpeas in a wide variety of applications without the burdensome but necessary task of cooking the beans or opening cans.