What is juice: poison or a storehouse of healthy vitamins and micronutrients? Some doctors categorically require avoiding juices, while others recommend drinking them daily. We are frightened by the huge sugar content, the risk of tooth decay, and in general, “who knows what they splashed there,” is probably full of preservatives and food additives. The Maternity Correspondent visited the Multon JSC juice production plant in Schelkovo, Moscow Region, to figure it out on the spot.
We put on non-woven disposable bathrobes, hats, shoe covers. Before entering the workshop, we treat our hands with alcohol, although it is strictly forbidden to touch anything. Each has a transmitter with an earpiece on its neck to hear the guide: it will be noisy in the workshop.
The first thing we are shown is a pasteurization plant. A ball of interwoven steel pipes of different thicknesses, then diving into smooth steel tanks, then emerging from them. Perfect cleanliness. Juice does not smell, does not smell at all. One can only imagine how the juice flows through these pipes, but the juice itself is nowhere to be seen. The process is completely closed, it is controlled by automation.
Pasteurization plant
Concentrated juice, from which we get the usual drink, comes to the plant from around the world. 17% of raw materials are produced in Russia, the rest is in the countries near and far abroad. For example, mangoes are brought from India and Mexico, pineapples from Thailand, South Africa, and Costa Rica, oranges from Brazil and Israel, cherries from Serbia and Poland. Fruits are collected, sorted and squeezed juice immediately - it is important to do this near the place of collection because when stored fruits are collected, vitamins and nutrients are destroyed.
In order to reduce transport costs, water is removed from freshly squeezed juice, turning it into a concentrated juice, reminiscent of honey inconsistency. Water is removed not by well-known boiling (this would destroy vitamins), but by evaporation in a vacuum at a temperature of 50-60 degrees. As a result, the juice decreases in volume by 6 times. Then the concentrated juice is cooled to a temperature of -18 (oddly enough, it does not freeze, but maintains fluidity) and is transported at this temperature to anywhere in the world.
In this form, concentrated juice is also delivered to the plant in Schelkovo, to the pasteurization plant. This is where the reverse process begins. First, the juice is heated to operating temperature, then exactly the same amount of water is returned that has been removed, and thoroughly mixed (homogenized) to make the juice structure homogeneous. Thus, one hundred percent of reconstituted juice is obtained.
To remove bacteria and microorganisms that could get out of the air, the juice is pasteurized. Pasteurization is a short-term heating (for example, apple juice is heated to 88 degrees for 30 seconds). Longer heating or a higher temperature would destroy vitamins. Then the juice is cooled to 20-30 degrees and sent to the bottling line.
We find ourselves in a huge bottling workshop. Everything rumbles and rattles around, we have to increase the volume of the earphone to continue to hear our guide. To the right, to the left, and even overhead, packets of juice go in different directions along serpentine conveyor belts. Baboons of multilayer packaging, still flat, lie against the walls, ready to be loaded into the packaging machine. The machine itself at first glance is nothing special: a large metal box in which something rumbles. But it is worth looking into the window - and the sight is bewitching.
The roll of multilayer packaging is unwound, passes through a bath with hydrogen peroxide for sterilization, immediately instantly dried with a stream of warm air and sealed into a pipe using heated polyethylene tape (the width of a similar tape roller corrector).
Next is the most interesting. The pipe of easily recognizable design moves from top to bottom, and inside it there is already juice (which we don’t see), and two powerful steel hands alternately grab the pipe in strictly defined places, squeeze it - and now the formed ones fall on the conveyor, water for better gliding by a stream of water liter bags with juice. All this happens so quickly that you barely have time to track the movement of the next finished package.
To be continued in the next part https://zen.yandex.ru/media/id/5d7253b81d656a00aec13040/is-the-juice-in-the-bag-healthy-part-2-5d8e068b8d5b5f00b24d2be2