Introduction to Fruit Pulp Processing Industry

When one form of food is transformed to another form of food involving industrial method to make it convenience food, that process is known as food Processing. Depending upon the complexity of industrial method, processing is categorized into primary, secondary, and tertiary processed food. Fruits and vegetables are perishable in nature having shelf life less than a week if kept unrefrigerated condition. Also there are currently high post-harvest loss for fruits and vegetable due to lack of required storage condition and space constrain, hence it is highly desirable to process fruits to retain their shelf life and also to reduce the size of product which in turn reduces the cost on transportation of bulk fruit and storage area requirement.

One such product of fruit processing is fruit pulp. Fruit pulp solid mass obtained by extraction or pressing fruits or vegetables. Pulp is categorized basis their storage condition, i.e., in powder or liquid form. In liquid form they can be used as either brine, syrup, or water form. Due to food preference of customer, frozen pulp is also in great demand as all inbuild nutrition are retained.  

Fruit Pulp Usage

As storage of fruit pulp is possible without any much alteration in flavor and nutrient content, has boosted the usage of fruit pulp in various industry. Pulp obtained from fruits are generally used for manufacturing of products such as fruit-based jams, marmaladed, jellies, sweets, beverage, and flavoring agents. It is also widely used as flavoring agent for various bakery, snacks, milk, juice, dairy product, and beverage industry. Now even works on food product enhancement is also going on, in the processing industry segment.

Fruit Pulp Processing Unit

Fruit pulp production line incorporates following mentioned steps, without which no fruit pulp industry shall be considered complete.

Step- 1 Raw Material Reception- Raw material are received in the facility, which are weighed and evaluated in terms of quality.

Step- 2 Sorting & Grading for preselection – Quality checked product are transferred to sorting and grading area where products are sorted and graded basis their size, color, dimension, quality and other such physical parameters.

 

Step- 3 Washing & Sanitization- Incoming fruits are full of farm dust and foreign particle clinging on the outer surface that they can be source of physical contamination. Also chemicals and fertilizers used during farming can be chemical contamination. To remove all sort of possible contamination, it is important to thoroughly wash and sanities the fruits before moving forward to processing.

Step- 4 Raw Material Maturation – The graded and sorted cleaned product is then moved to maturation or ripening chamber where the unripe or raw fruits are left for ripening. Ripening room have attached ethylene generator that facilitate the ripening process along with maintaining temperature and humidity. During maturation, there is generation of carbon dioxide which need to be also regularly remove from ripening chamber to prevent increase in toxicological level.   

Step- 5 Pulp Processing-

1. Peeling & Cutting– Before extracting the pulp, fruit is peeled and chopped into smaller desired pieces, to facilitate destoning and crushing process.
2. Destoning– In this step, fruits containing stones also known as seed and heart are removed from fruit. Many fruits have seed that when crushed may release sour or off flavor to the pulp which will be highly undesirable.
3. Crushing– The chopped and destoned fruit is then moved to crushing machine where the fruit is crushed via fine and course crusher or screw type injector.

Step- 6 Pasteurization and homogenization- By giving heat treatment, all present microbial contamination causing agents can be deactivated, which will in return increase the shelf life of product. The pasteurized product is then either cooled down and filled in case of normal condition or is directly hot filled in aseptic condition for aseptic filling.  

Step- 7 Storage- Having optimal cold storage condition for finished product is important to prevent any sort of nutritional and characteristic loss and to prevent microbial contamination.

Issues

Without skilled labor, no frequent audits and using standard pulp conservation procedures is impacting the business of pulp manufacturing segment.

Not abiding to parameters such as-

1. Cleaning- Using uncleaned or unhygienic water for raw material cleaning, not following described SOP such as time.
2. Sanitization- Using sanitizing agent not listed in the authorized record, not maintain required concentration of chemical. variation in listed time of exposure.
3. Process -Uncleaned pipelines and processing equipment, chemical residue in pipeline from cleaning agent, not following pasteurization temperature and time described in SOP, dilution of product with water to adjust TSS level.

Conclusion

From quality aspect, control need to be offer for high nutritional, microbiological and sensory quality product to consumers. To have high quality end pulp, it is important to have properly washed and sanitized fresh fruits as raw material, which shall help in combatting microbial load. Also having periodic inspection internally and by third parties will also help strengthen the quality of product. Having standard SOP, developing HACCP plans in line to the facility for having effective action plan.