Extraction of natural flavours from fruits & vegetables

The fragile, delicate flavours of tropical fruits such as guava, banana, mango and passionfruit are lost or damaged in the course of conventional processing. This is particularly true of the valuable "top-notes".

FT Technologies’ Spinning Cone Column (SCC) can be designed to perform pasteurisation,  de-aeration and aroma recovery simultaneously on many fruit and vegetable juices and purees. The fruit juice or puree can be processed as soon as it leaves the finisher meaning that the aroma recovered is absolutely true to the fresh fruit.

The SCC can readily handle thick, viscous purees which would be impossible to process in any other aroma recovery system. The ability of the SCC to process slurries makes it possible to recover entirely natural essences from strawberry, passionfruit, tropical fruit, tomato and other materials where capturing the "top-note" is imperative to maintaining a complete flavour profile. With the importance of FTNF (From The Named Fruit) flavours growing in importance in many parts of the world, the SCC ensures the ability to collect the best natural flavours for addition to food products so that flavour regulations can be complied with.

The high mass-transfer efficiency of the Spinning Cone Column, combined with its low thermal impact, make it an ideal system for capturing premium quality fruit and vegetable essences. In fact, the flavours recovered using the SCC are so faithful to the raw material, some flavour houses use SCC aromas as templates for synthetic or nature-identical flavours.

All the major polar and apolar aroma and flavours from fruit can be recovered using the SCC, including: Banana, Pineapple, Blueberry, Cantaloupe, Melon, Guava, Kiwi, Mango, Papaya, Passion Fruit, Peach, Apple, Pear, Raspberry, Strawberry, Watermelon etc...

Benefits of the SCC for the recovery of and concentration of aroma components in fruit juice and purees include:

• Fast and efficient recovery of sensitive aroma compounds
• Concentration of the essence components to a high fold
• No damage to the natural essences or colour
• Can be integrated with the Centritherm evaporator to produce premium flavour fruit concentrates
• Can be made into a modular system to allow for capacity increases
• Easily operated and cleaned with built-in CIP

The key stages for flavour loss
Conventional fruit processing destroys aroma and flavour at various stages in production. These stages include:

1: Extraction. The separation of juice and solids normally involves milling the raw material followed by pressing or centrifuging.  Substantial flavour is lost as it is left behind in the waste solid material.

2: Enzyme treatment. Enzymes are an important part of fruit and vegetable processing, increasing yields and reducing processing costs.  Unfortunately, the same process that breaks down the plant tissue can often destroy the flavour compounds.

3: Heat treatment. Pasteurisation substantially increases the shelf life of juice or puree. However, the high temperatures utilised can cause degradation or loss of the delicate volatile favour compounds.

4: Concentration. Loss or destruction of most of the volatile aroma/flavour compounds occurs during thermal evaporation.
 
5: Drying, Dehydration, Spray Drying.  What flavour remains can often be damaged further.

The application of the SCC during the critical stages of processing enables an entirely new standard for products “from concentrate” as well as a completely new range of high-quality natural fruit and vegetable flavours. Some examples are discussed below.

Essence Concentration
The performance of conventional aroma recovery systems on some fruits and vegetables allows the production of essences at approximately 150 fold. Reflux and long thermal exposures are normally required to reach this level.

The SCC can produce a 150 fold essence with a single pass of approximately 25 seconds residence time. Moreover, if this recovered essence is passed through the SCC a second time, an essence of around 1,500 fold or more may be produced. This high strength essence has all of the original top-notes intact.

Aroma Recovery from Waste Streams
The cheapest, most abundant source of excellent natural flavour in the world is the discarded portion of fruits and vegetables.  The SCC has been used to extract value from these streams by recovering the natural flavour in a concentrated liquid form. Examples include apple or berry pomace, crushed cherry stones, citrus peel and "tops and tails" from onion processing.

Superior fruit concentrates
Integration of the SCC in a typical concentrate process has proven its ability in multiple locations to produce fruit and vegetable concentrates which are superior to traditional products. This configuration is particularly advantageous when solids are present and/or the end product is a paste.

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Aseptic packing
Growing in use is the SCC’s integration in an aseptic process, avoiding the previously inevitable loss of flavour during heat treatment and subsequent storage. The SCC’s clear flavour condensate resulting from this application is easily cold-sterilised before it is dosed back aseptically at the filling stage.

Click here to find out more about the Spinning Cone Column.