Juice is a liquid that is naturally contained in fruit and vegetables. It is commonly consumed as a beverage or used as an ingredient or flavouring in foods. Juice is prepared by mechanically squeezing or macerating fruit or vegetable flesh without the application of heat or solvents. For example, orange juice is the liquid extract of the fruit of the orange tree, and tomato juice is the liquid that results from pressing the fruit of the tomato plant. Common methods for preservation and processing of fruit juices include canning,pasteurization, concentrating[1], freezing, evaporation and spray drying. A concentrate is a form of substance which has had the majority of its base component (in the case of a liquid: the solvent) removed. Typically this will be the removal of water from a solution or suspension such as the removal of water from fruit juice. One benefit of producing a concentrate is that of a reduction in weight and volume for transportation as the concentrate can be re-constituted at the time of usage by the addition of the solvent.
Process Description The following processes concerns mainly with the fruit to juice concentrate production. Thorough process outline will be presented in the final paper.
Harvesting/collection
Oranges are harvested from large groves. When the mature fruit is ready to pick, a crew of pickers is sent in to pull the fruit off the trees. For higher picking rate companies on the other hand, use mechanical pickers instead of crew of pickers. The collected fruit is sent to plants for juice processing. The oranges are generally shipped via truck to juice extraction facilities, where they are unloaded by a gravity feed onto a conveyor belt that transports the fruit to a storage bin.
Washing
As the fruits are unloaded from the trucks, they are washed and loaded to belt conveyors proceeding inside the extraction plant. This process removes debris and dirt and reduces the number of microbes.
Selection and