Industrial pasteurization of jams and marmalades
Our client, a company producing high-end fruit jams and marmalades, was looking for a solution to avoid overheating of their jam while maintaining a quick and effective sterilization process!
Customer needs
Pasteurization is a key step in the production of industrial jams. This process is essential to guarantee a product free of any unwanted microorganisms. Usually, this pasteurization induce overheating (time and temperature) of the product, which negatively impact it’s quality.
To improve it’s high quality jams production process, our client trusted SAIREM to find an efficient and innovative solution.
Main constraints
The jam pasteurization process requires high temperature before conditioning, about 90 °C, to be sure to destroy the harmful micro-organisms that could be present in the products. Usually, to reach the requested temperature at the conditioning step, the jam must be overheated during the previous cooking phase, as there is heat losses all along the pipes.
So the issue our customer was facing was to keep an efficient pasteurizing process, while avoiding overheating or overcooking of the product, which alter its taste and organoleptic properties.
Solution proposed
Our engineers developed a continuous flow microwave reactor that can heat large amounts of jam in just a few seconds, just before conditioning, without altering the taste of the fruits. Our patented technology can adapt to very high production rates, from a few hundred kg/h to more than 15 tons/h.
With our solution, you can lower the cooking temperature of the jam by roughly 20°C. Just before conditioning, our microwave reactor quickly raises the temperature of the jam at 90 °C, in a few seconds only, in order to pasteurize it. By doing so, you avoid overcooking and overheating of your product.
Key benefits
The addition of our process to your production line will allow you to choose the right cooking temperature to respect the fruit while ensuring the sanitary quality of your consumer products :
- You can produce low sugar jams of high quality, by lowering the cooking temperature
- You preserve the integrity of your fruit pieces by heating the jam at the requested temperature for a very short time only
- Your production line needs few modifications as you simply need to replace a short section of your production line with our in-line reactor
Need help to find the best solution ?
Our free microwave and radio-frequency guide for food applications will help you to better understand these technologies, and find the solution the most adapted to your needs.
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