Dave in AZ said in How to prevent fine powder seasoning from making everyone sneeze/cough?:

processhead mrobisr
You’ll get a laugh from this pic then. Back before covid, someone was worried about lead dust and powder dust while reloading. I was making a joke and made this picture of me reloading, saying this is how I did it.

Little did I know that a few years later the Age of Covid would hit, and I would walk around like this at my airport job for 2 years!

That’s a great picture!

Little did I know that a few years later the Age of Covid would hit, and I would walk around like this at my airport job for 2 years!

Dave in AZ Back in my younger meaner days I was the spice man in a commercial meat plant and some of the recipes contained white pepper which I scooped and measured by the pound. It did not take but one time to handle that stuff loosely and I sneezed for hours, so needless to say I learned to scoop it very gently. Occasionally just to be mean I would take a pinch out of my spice room and go out to the work floor and flick a pinch full in the air and just sit back and enjoy the show, yes I know that is just mean, but we all played jokes on each other. The boss even told me one time I know what you are doing, but he just laughed and walked away probably since he spent most of his time looking through a window at the floor and not dealing with the sneeze fits.

I did the spice formula batching in the family sausage business for a time as well. Besides the fine ground black and white pepper, another bad one was ground marjoram spice, it was extremely fine, light and dusty. It would fly everywhere while I was weighing out pounds of the stuff for Polish sausage seasoning.
Eventually I started using a half mask respirator with cartridge filters and it made a world of difference. Before that, a half day of batching spices would leave my nose overloaded with seasoning powder/ aromas where I couldn’t smell much of else for a couple days aftewards.

P.s. mix spices with water first in some other room or outside, is the correct answer I couldn’t resist answering, and who doesn’t love a good Necropost!

You definitely just want to be extremely gentle with them once you open the package. Applying moisture to the seasoning will definitely help contain the dustiness of it. Mixing it into the water and sure gel mixture you are adding may help and could be the answer. I always use a meat mixer, and it has a lid, so I carefully open the bag and dump the seasoning in gently, then quickly place the lid on the mixer. I never get absolutely 100% of it contained, but usually enough to stop me from having a sneezing fit.

We have a Butter Flavored Seasoning and Marinade that I use to inject a lot of different cuts of meat with, and this seasoning is exactly like your description and experience with the Buffalo Bleu Cheese Snack Stick Seasoning. Since I use it as an injection, I’m immediately opening and dumping it in a container of water to dissolve and mix, and that does prevent a lot of the seasoning dust cloud that would make you sneeze.

So, basically dump straight into a mixer with a lid or dump the seasoning package straight into water are the two things I’ve done.
If anyone has had better luck with another method, I’d love to hear any other success stories as well.