What is the fruit concentrate?

Are fruit concentrate and fruit juice the same things? The answer is No; they are different things. Almost all of the juices in the market are made of fruit concentrate. Using concentrate lets the producer make juice the whole year (even out of fresh fruit season). The concentrate is made of the appropriate varieties of fruits.

Fruit concentrate production process

The fruit concentrate production process includes the following steps:

• Purchasing fresh fruit
• Washing
• Juice extraction
• Dewatering
• Filtration (at least in 2 stages)
• Deaeration
• Concentration or cooking
• Concentrate Storage in large tanks
• Sterilization

Customers always think the factory-produced juice has no vitamins or micronutrients. This is somehow wrong. Because, although a little bit of the fruit nutrients are lost during the cooking process, the final product has at least half of the fruit nutrients.

Concentrating process in factories is achieved via three possible methods:

• Thermal concentration
• Freezing concentration
• Reverse osmosis concentration

Thermal concentration is popular among factories. Easy transportation (especially in the case of exporting to other countries) is one of the substantial advantages of fruit concentrate. For example, in Russia, the process of grape juice production is so expensive. Therefore, to produce grape juice, they purchase grape concentrate from Iran and produce juice by diluting the concentrate at a lower cost.