How to Make Bottled Fruit Juice

Bottled fruit juice has the characteristic of portable, rich in nutrition, replenish the water which is necessary for the human body. So it is a trend to proceed fruit into juice for fruit beverage factory. So if you want to run one bottled juice plant, what do you need to prepare?

There are two materials that can be made into bottled fruit juice: the first use fresh fruits as raw material to make 100% NFC fruit juice. It is suitable for medium and large scale fruit beverage factory. Because if you make 100% NFC juice, you need to do a big investment, have a large quantity of high-quality fresh fruits as your source of raw materials and a stable supply chain. But NFC juice also has a much higher profit than reconstituted fruit juice; The second method is that you can buy concentrated fruit juice or juice powder from concentrated juice factory, then use them as raw materials, dilute with water and some other ingredients to make into reconstituted juice. It is suitable for a start-up business and with low investment and capacity. Reconstituted juice production is still the mainstream bottled juice production method in developing countries because of the low entry barrier.

Firstly you need to learn about what license you need to get if you want to open one fruit juice processing factory, then apply food production license and business license to the local government. After that you can buy or rent land to build the workshop, the juice processing equipment supplier will provide you equipment layout according to your workshop size. At last, you need to recruit operators, which need one plant manager, Mechanical engineers and electrical engineers, operators.

After you decide which material you want to use, then you can source juice processing equipment from food and beverage equipment supplier. Here we take the production of reconstituted juice as an example and explain to you which equipment is needed.

The blending system includes one diaphragm pump, two blending tanks, double filters, hot water generating system, pipelines, valves and connections. The diaphragm pump draws the concentrated juice from the barrel to the blending tank, in the blending tank, hot water, concentrated juice and other flavor agents will be mixed together to make drinkable juice.

Blending tanks also call mixing tank, the main function is to mix concentrated fruit juice, flavor ingredients, antioxidants, sugar and water in a certain ratio to dilute it into a drinkable juice. To increase efficiency and continuity of production, we usually equip two blending tanks. The blending process is also divided into cold blending and hot blending, hot blending temperature is about 50-60℃, which is higher efficiency than cold blending; Cold blending is under ambient temperature and can reduce the loss of  VC in the juice.

Usually, when making the blending juice, many powder agents will also be dosed into the juice to increase its flavor for the juice. And the flavor agents will be dissolved into the water powder mixer or high shear emulsification tank. The dissolving system includes one dissolving tank, one double filter, and one material transfer pump. To increase the efficiency of the dissolving process, the hot dissolving process will be adopted at 85℃.

These three pieces of equipment are integrated together. The sterilizer kills the microorganism in juice; The homogenizer further emulsifies juice and make it more even; The vacuum degasser can remove the air in the juice and makes the juice has a longer shelf life. We will use different sterilizers (plate sterilizer or tubular sterilizer) to process according to juice characteristics (PH value, viscosity, whether it contains juice particles).

The juice from the blending tank will be pumped into the balance tank in the sterilizer, then heat the juice to 65-70℃ by heat exchanger for homogenizing and degassing, after that, the juice will flow to the plate or tubular heat exchanger again to heat to the sterilizing/pasteurizing temperature and holding for a certain time, then cooling the juice to filling temperature(85℃).

For the juice pH value of less than 4.5, the 90-95℃ pasteurizing is enough for the juice, and for the juice with more than 4.5 pH, the 115-125℃ is OK.

The bottled juice filling machine is the core machine in the juice bottling line. Reconstituted juice will use hot filling technology(85-89℃) to fill into ribbed PET bottles or glass bottles. This filling system is mainly composed of bottle washing parts, juice filling and capping parts, juice recovery system. The machine capacity is 2000BPH-30000BPH available for clients’ different speed requirements.

With the higher hygiene requirements, we can also adopt the ultra-clean filling system to fill the juice into the bottles. the filling temperature is 68-72℃, and with two bottle rinsing stations(disinfectant solution rinsing, sterilize water rinsing), one filling station and one capping station. And the filling section will make into 100,000 level clean room.

The bottled juice tilt conveyor can make bottled juice tilted and use juice itself temperature to secondary sterilize bottle caps. The general sterilizing process is 80℃for 20-40S.

This bottled juice pasteurizing and cooling tunnel has four sections, preheating section from 80℃ to 95℃, pasteurizing section with 95℃ holding for 20-30 minutes, the pre-cooling section from 95℃ to 60℃, and cooling section to 30℃. So it has two functions, one is secondary pasteurizing, the other is cooling bottled juice to 30℃ for end packaging.

Juice bottles mostly adopt sleeve label machines or non-dry stick label machines. Bottle label capacity is 1-200 bottles/min, servo motor to control label feeding to ensure high precision.

There are two packing style for bottled juice, one is packing into shrinkage film, the other is packing into carton box.

CIP station is mainly used for cleaning pipes, pumps, juice tanks and filling machine without assembling the machines. This station enhances the efficiency of the whole production line and can guarantee the sanitary of the end products.

This includes RO water treatment system, boiler to generate steam for heating and sterilizing juice, cooling water tower and air compressor.