Abstract:

Health, natural goodness, no additives or sweeteners, and not least an intensive taste experience – this is what more and more consumers expect when they buy beverages of all kinds, and more particularly fruit juices. And most particularly when it comes to high-quality (and high-priced) premium juices. The markets are becoming polarised, because consumers are too – and vice versa. On the shelves, the decision lies between the more affordable “normal juice” and the upmarket premium beverage with measurable added benefits. There is a new and rapidly accelerating trend towards admixing entire fruit cells and fruit chunks, creating beverages that in terms of experiential mouth-feel are gratifyingly like drinking “liquid fruit”. In contrast to smoothies, which tend to resemble a fruit purée, beverages of this kind can be drunk like a normal juice. For handling these fruit-cell and fruit-chunk constituents in their various manifestations at the process engineering components, Krones has done multifarious R&D work on this, and has already installed a series of the relevant systems. They can cope with fruit-juice constituents of differing composition, including sacs, fibres, fruit chunks and pulps.