Aseptic Fruit Puree: Production and Applications in Food

Certainly, food manufacturers benefit from using the best and most convenient materials to create their products. Today, many segments of the industry rely on fruit purees to reduce artificial additives and ingredients and favor a more natural approach to their offer. Keep reading to discover the advantages of aseptic fruit puree, plus how it is made.

A quick look into food preservation and safety

Humanity has preserved food for millennia. Historians believe agriculture and food preservation allowed human societies to settle by providing food and making it possible to store it safely in bulk. Some common methods hailing from history include cooling, freezing, boiling, drying, smoking, pickling, sugaring, and salting (SmartSense, 2018).

Today, these processes have been improved and finessed. For example, fruit drink concentrates, jellies, and all types of jams are sugar-conserved. Sterilized, sealed packaging provides protection against any contamination and gives products a longer shelf life (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, n.d.).

So it is no understatement that food safety is paramount in the industry. Manufacturers everywhere need to guarantee that their products are safe for consumption. Consequently, there are many things they can do to ensure this while satisfying consumers’ demands. Some use tried-and-tested methods, like freezing and heating. Others even lean into clean food trends and employ natural preservatives instead of artificial ones, for example.

The rise of aseptic processing

The race for safer food production has led to aseptic processing. Essentially, it is the processing and packaging of a sterile product into sterilized containers in sterilized environments. It aims to prevent any viable microbiological contamination or recontamination of the sterile product (Kadam et al., 2015).

The main benefits of aseptic products are (Kadam et al., 2015):

• Longer shelf life.
• Wider range of packaging sizes.
• More container materials.
• Improved nutritional and sensory properties.

Aseptic fruit puree production and advantages

As mentioned, many food industry segments use fruit purees as an ingredient. Why? Firstly, they act as natural taste, color, and texture enhancers. In fact, they instill a non-artificial intense fruit flavor into food products. Secondly, they also work as natural sweeteners. And last but not least, fruit purees bring an important nutritional content (Grand View Research, 2020; Allied Market Research, 2021; Transparency Market Research, 2021).

Moreover, the pulp of fruit stands out among other natural ingredients, like fresh produce or even frozen fruits. The reason is simple but powerful for producers: it is more efficiently handled (Allied Market Research, 2021).

All these properties become enhanced in aseptic fruit puree. Let’s see how.

Producing aseptic fruit puree