Process for recovery of waste gel-mass from softgel manufacturing process

An encapsulation process including recovery of gel-mass from a gel-mass-containing waste material, comprising the steps of:

• (a) encapsulating a product thereby producing an encapsulated product and a gel-mass-containing waste material;
• (b) retrieving the gel-mass-containing waste material after said encapsulating step with sanitary mangle rolls;
• c) introducing the gel-mass-containing waste material into a displacement liquid which is an oil-miscible liquid heated to a temperature in a range of from 50° C. to 90° C. to facilitate melting the gel-mass-containing waste material to produce an oil phase and a non-oil phase;
• (d) separating the non-oil phase to provide a recovered gel-mass;
• (e) combining the recovered gel-mass with fresh encapsulating material to provide a combined encapsulating material;
• and
• (f) feeding the combined encapsulating material to step (a) for encapsulation of an additional product from a same lot of the product which was encapsulated in the step (a) that produced the gel-mass-containing waste material from which the recovered gel-mass of step (d) was obtained.