A reaction engineering approach (REA) has been utilized to formulate drying kinetics for convective drying of dairy products such as skim milk, whole milk, lactose, cream and whey proteins concentrate. When developing the drying kinetics, the droplet was assumed to be a binary mixture of solids and water. The relative activation energy parameter reflected the overall degree of difficulty in removing moisture from the droplets containing solutes such as fat, proteins, lactose and minerals. The role of individual solute to represent the difficulty in water removal was not distinctive in previous models. In this study the new composite REA is proposed to deal with drying of aqueous droplets containing two or multiple solutes in order to illustrate the effect of individual solute. The composite REA is validated using experimental data obtained from the published literature on hot air drying of aqueous sucrose-maltodextrin and fructose-maltodextrin droplets. This study is expected to provide more understanding on utilizing the REA to formulate the comprehensive drying kinetics model on drying of materials containing multiple solutes.