The whole fruit inside the drink: handle with care

Krones has conceived a complete, holistically system has thus been designed for producing and bottling high-quality premium juices or also milk-based mixed drinks with a fruit content.

E-twin-flow concept is the new technological response by Krones to an emerging trend in consumption: whole fruit chunks mixed with premium juice or upmarket milk-based mixed beverages.
For the process engineering required to handle these fruit preparations featuring sacs, fibres, fruit chunks or pulp, Krones AG (Neutraubling, Germany) has developed a twin-flow process with separated product flows.

e-twin-flow concept
For the process engineering required to handle these fruit preparations featuring sacs, fibres, fruit chunks or pulp in milk-based mixed drinks or premium juices, Krones AG, Neutraubling, Germany, has developed a twin-flow process with separated product flows.

In this twin-flow process, the product flows are handled separately, so as to rigorously minimise the thermal loading on the end-product. The principal quantity, the juice, can be pasteurised in the conventional way using plate heat exchangers (on request, of course, also with shell-and-tube heat exchangers, with concomitantly reduced wear and tear). The crucial factor is that in the juice flow more affordable standard components can be used, like centrifugal pumps, valves with a standard stroke, etc. The fruit preparation, by contrast, mixed with a small quantity of juice, is always treated in specially dimensioned shell-and-tube heat exchangers, which enables the cost-intensive fruit preparation to be very gently pasteurised. Product losses and damage to the valuable fruit chunks are significantly reduced. In its twin-flow concept, Krones rigorously deploys deaeration only for the juice, but not for the fruit preparation.
By developing these sophisticated process-engineering systems, Krones has put in place the requisite preconditions for cost-efficiently and gently preparing fruit preparations while ensuring minimised damage rates. In this concept, the thermally treated fruit preparation is then first pre-dosed into the containers using a pre-filler, after which the main filler adds the flash-pasteurised juice at the same temperature.                              

FlexiFruit pre-dosing system
Hot-filling in a twin-flow concept - To enable juices consisting of sacs, fibres, fruit chunks or pulp to be filled as gently as possible, Krones rigorously separates the juice from the fruit content itself, both in the process engineering for thermal treatment and in the filling technology downstream. For this purpose, Krones has created a pre-dosing filler called FlexiFruit for the fruit particle content before the actual juice filling carousel in the main filler.
The goal of the filling process is to run hot pre-dosing into the containers of a fruit-fibre or fruit-chunk mixture with a fruit content of around 50% in chunks measuring up to 10 x 10 x 10 mm in size, plus 50% juice, before the actual free-jet hot-filler is reached. Up to now, piston fillers have mostly been used for this purpose; the trouble is that they are not cippable, or not completely. Post-dripping may impair the accuracy of the dosing function, which is why Krones has developed a simple, hygienic system that’s easy to clean, one that if at all possible no longer drips after dosing: a solution featuring diaphragm valves was chosen, which offers the additional benefit of minimising the damage rate.
One of the system’s major advantages is that the dosing filler itself does not need to possess an additional measuring instrument. What happens is that the entire fill quantity is measured in the downstream weighing-cell filler, where the juice without any fruit cells is bottled. High priority was also given to ensuring operator-friendly maintenance.

FlexiFruit
Thanks to holistically conceived systems engineering, Krones is able to offer a seamless concept covering both process and filling technologies for producing and bottling beverages that contain fruit chunks and fruit fibres.