The Berry fruits mainly include blackberry, blueberry, strawberry, raspberry, cranberry, buckthorn berry and mulberry, They have distinct colors, sweet flavors and are rich of textures, fruit pulp and juice, vitamins, minerals matters and fiber contents. Regular consumption of these fruits or value-added products has a positive influence on aging, obesity and other health conditions.

Berry fruits can proceed into value-added products such as juice, puree, concentrated and frozen products, for the concentrated berry fruit juice or puree can be used for preparation of beverage, yogurt, jams, smoothies and many other food products. The processing of berry fruits has been growing steadily these years as human beings explore their nutritional value.

Berry fruits are rich in soft pulp, some fruits like strawberry do not have the peel to protect the fruit flesh, so after harvesting and before processing, they need to be stored at 0-4℃cold temperature to avoid rotting.

The berry fruit value-added end products can be filled into aseptic bags in drums, bottles, pouches, cartons and other consumable packages.

The berry fruit processing line has a high degree of flexibility and modular functions, it can be configured freely according to the different raw materials and different products that customers want to produce.

The production line includes berry washing and sorting system, berry crushing and pulping system(for puree production), vacuum membrane pressing system(for berry juice production), blending system(for blended juice production), berry fruit juice/puree evaporating system(for concentrated products producing), sterilizing and filling system, CIP system.

All the material contact parts are made of food-grade SUS304 material, after each round of production, the production equipment, pipelines, and storage tanks need to be cleaned by CIP, which can ensure the production line with hygiene conditions.

Berry Fruit Puree: single strength puree is 7-12 Brix can be filled into aseptic bags in bulk or pouches as baby food. The concentrated puree is 28-30 Brix can be filled into aseptic bags as raw materials for producing juice and milk drinks, cakes or smoothies.

Berry Fruit Juice: NFC clear juice can be blended with ingredients and filled into small bottles or cartons for consumption. Concentrated clear juice can be filled into aseptic bags in drums as preparations for juice processing, and concentrated products are 65-75brix.

Dry Berry Fruits: The drained fresh berry fruits are evenly placed on the plate. They should not be overlapped and piled. There must be a gap between the fruits and the fruits. The fruit must be placed slowly to prevent the fruit from breaking. Stack them up and place them in a liquid container. Then, the fruit can be dried. Drying process: the temperature of the drying room should not be too high, 40℃-50℃ is suitable, the temperature after putting it in should be raised to 60℃-70℃, then the temperature is lowered, and then the temperature is raised, the temperature difference can make the water in the fruit disperse the speed Speed ​​up to shorten the drying time. The drying time of blueberries is 8-10 hours, and the water content of the fruit is between 20%-30%. Selection and shaping process: Take out the dried blueberry fruit in the tray, and manually shape the fruit body until it is uniform and full. Afterward, the even dried blueberries are sorted out according to their grades. The grading standard is that the fruit body is uniform and full as the superior grade, and the uneven and not full ones will be classified as the inferior product and eliminated. Secondary drying process: the selected dried blueberries are dried twice,
In order to meet the quality requirements of dried fruit. The purpose of drying the dried fruit twice is to evaporate more water in the fruit and to control the moisture content in the dried fruit between 8%-16%. When drying, the dried fruits should be neatly placed in trays and stacked in a special drying pallet truck. There should be a space of about 10 cm between the tray and the tray, the purpose is to better control the drying moisture. When drying, the temperature is about 65 degrees Celsius, and the drying time is within 12 hours.

Berry Fruit Wine: Berry fruit juice is obtained from fresh berry fruits, then the berry juice will be filtered, alcoholic fermentation, blending with other ingredients, after plate filtering, sterilizing, and filling into bottles or cans.

Berry Fruit Jam: The blueberry, blackberry, strawberry and mulberry can be made into the fruit jam, fresh berry fruits firstly will be made into the fruit pulp, then berry fruit pulp will mix with pectin, sugar, acid and other ingredients, then concentrated to a certain degree, the berry fruit jam will be filled into glass jars or cans.

Fresh berries after thawing, will be unloaded into the washing machine to remove impurity, then use the belt sorting conveyor to sort out the rotten and unripe fruits. After that, the hammer chopper will smash berries into mash, and then transfer them to preheater to soft the tissue and inactivate the enzyme in fruit mashes, after heating, the mashes will be pumped to the double stage pulping machine to extract puree from the berry fruit mashes. Till this step, we obtain the berry puree, and if the end clients want to produce the concentrated puree, then the puree will be sent to force circulation evaporator for concentrating, otherwise, the puree will be sterilized by tube sterilizer and then filled into bulk aseptic bags for storage.

Fresh berry fruits after washing, sorting, milling and pulping, the puree will be sent to enzyme treatment tank to increase the juice yield rate, after that, the decanter centrifuge separator will be used for separating the juice from puree. And if you want to make clear juice, then the disk centrifuge separator or ultra- filtration system will be added to remove the solids in the juice. At last, the juice will be sent to for evaporation, sterilizing and filling into bottles or tin cans.

Unload the thawed berries into the washing tank, soak and clean for 3-5 minutes, and then use the scraper elevator to send them to the next process for high-pressure spray cleaning and drum washing machine to get rid of the sand and dirty matters. Finally, the unqualified fruit is manually removed on the mesh belt sorting machine.

The berry hammer chopper is designed for berry fruit and other fruit/vegetables crushing. But if for strawberry, before milling, one fruit stalker is adopted to remove the stem.

After that, the berry mash is heated to 70℃holding for 15-20min for enzyme activation by one tubular heater, then cool down to 40℃for pulping.

The puree yield rate is related to pulping machine rotor speed, puree moisture content, usually for the higher rotor speed and lower moisture content can increase the yield rate. The filter screen also acts as a primary element of separation in the pulping machine. Berry puree processing requires the screen size between 0.6-1.0mm, minor changes in screen size will have a significant influence on the quality and yield rate of the puree, a larger screen size can have a higher yield rate of puree.

There are two technological processes for berry juice extracting:

1. Use vacuum membrane press filter to extract the juice, the berry fruits after mashed by hammer mill, then the pomace will be sent to the vacuum press for juice extracting. Use this method can maximize the juice yield and avoid juice oxidation during extracting.

2.Use decanter centrifuge separator. The decanter is an ideal equipment to separate the juice from the pomace, but in order to increase the yield rate, before decanter separating, the enzymatic hydrolysis process is executed for initial solid separating. With this method, the yield rate can reach 90%.

Concentration is an important step used to dewatering the liquid food. The concentration liquid has the advantage of reducing storage and transportation volume and increasing the shelf life. For the berry puree, we use the force circulation evaporator to perform the concentration process; for berry juice, the falling film evaporator will be adopted to concentrate. To keep the flavor, color and nutrient, need to keep lower process temperature and shorter residence time. If needed, an aroma recovery system can be equipped.

The Clear berry juice concentrated or berry puree sterilizing process is 90-121℃holding for 5S-120S depend on the density, viscosity of products and end package containers. The puree and concentrated use the triple shell heat exchanger to do the thermal treatment, and for the juice and concentrated products, the tubular sterilizer will be qualified as it is a lower viscosity. After sterilizing, the concentrated products can be filled into aseptic bags in drums, and for the non-concentrated products, they can be filled into small bottles, tin cans or pouches.