This study has investigated the effect of different concentrations for various templating acids on the porosity of the final products from a new templating approach. A new production process has been successfully developed to create highly-porous powder templates through the spray drying of lactose solutions containing ethanol-soluble food-grade acids as templating agents and then removing these acids by ethanol washing of the spray-dried powders. The extents of in-process crystallization for the lactose/templating acids powders have been studied during spray drying. It has been found that increasing the templating-acids concentrations significantly increased the degrees of crystallinity for lactose in spray-dried powders. Textural properties, such as the surface area of the resultant lactose, changed considerably by varying the concentrations of different templating acids, due to changes in the degrees of lactose crystallinity for the final spray-dried products. The yields from spray drying have also been significantly decreased at higher concentrations of templating acids. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.