Premium juice with fruit pulps

Analysis of particle size and shape in product development and quality control of fruit juices

Freshly squeezed orange juice and other fruit juices with higher fruit flesh content are becoming increasingly popular. There are also modern, healthy drinks with pieces of fruit – such as pineapple, aloe, coconut, pumpkin, strawberry that have a high fibre content. The chunky, natural fruit components play an important role in high-quality fruit drinks. They need to be treated as carefully as possible and appear intact in the final product; this places special demands on the production and filling process. The reliable characterisation of the solid components in terms of size and shape ensures compliance with quality standards in incoming goods, further processing to the final product itself.

Traditionally, processes such as wet screening and microscopy are used in the analysis of fruit juice. These measurement principles are usually very time consuming and yet can acquire record a small number of particles, which weakens the validity of the analysis. The dynamic image analysis with QICPIC opens up the possibility of determining characteristics such as the size and shape of juice cells, fruit pieces, fibres or pulps directly in the drink from development to production. In this case, large sample volumes with a high number of particles are measured in a short period of time and this therefore provides statistically relevant measurement results.

Wet dispersion systems, such as FLOWCELL or LIXELL, facilitate very careful treatment of the sample material. The corresponding control and evaluation software PAQXOS enables a variety of meaningful analyses for the exploration of the acquired data. Various evaluation modes, distribution diagrams for size and shape, a particle gallery or the raw data film measurement provide a comprehensive insight and enable a deeper understanding of the product and process.