Apple Juice Concentrate

Apples arriving at a juice plant are washed, milled to a mash, and pressed. The juice that comes off is cloudy and enzymatically active, and it is clarified and filtered before being fed to an evaporator, where heat under reduced pressure boils water away at a temperature low enough to limit damage to the juice. What leaves the evaporator is concentrate: the same fruit solids, sugars, and acids in a fraction of the water.

Concentration

The removal of water from juice by evaporation, expressed as the degree to which the soluble solids have been raised relative to the single-strength juice.

Aroma recovery

Volatile aroma compounds driven off during evaporation are captured separately and can be added back, because concentrate stripped of them reconstitutes into a flat juice.

Reconstitution

Adding back water to return the concentrate to single-strength juice, done at or near the market where the juice is sold.

Concentrate is specified on soluble solids, acidity, colour, clarity, and the absence of off flavours, and it inherits every one of these from the fruit that went into the press. Cultivar mix determines the sugar-acid balance, and processors blend deliberately to hit a target — an all-dessert-apple concentrate is bland, and acidic culinary and cider cultivars are used to give it structure.

The feedstock is largely fruit the fresh market rejected: undersized, misshapen, blemished, or coming out of storage past its fresh-market life. That is a legitimate and intended use of sound fruit, but it sets a limit — rotten, mouldy, or contaminated fruit brings its problems into the juice, and patulin, a mycotoxin produced by moulds that grow on damaged apples, is a documented and regulated concern in apple juice. Fruit selection and cleaning before pressing are the controls, and they matter more here than any step in the evaporator.

Concentrate ships frozen in drums and totes, and chilled in bulk tanks and flexitanks for large flows. It is a genuinely international commodity product traded between hemispheres and between seasons, allowing a juice packer to run all year on fruit harvested at different times in different places. Because it is blended and reconstituted at destination, the concentrate trade also carries authenticity concerns — adulteration with sugars or with cheaper juices is a known issue, and analytical authentication is part of the trade's routine.

Most apple juice concentrate is reconstituted into apple juice for drinking. Beyond that it is one of the food industry's workhorse sweetening and juice-content ingredients: it goes into juice blends, where its mild flavour lets it carry more assertive juices, into nectars, cider and fermented drinks, and into confectionery, bakery, and preserves as a fruit-derived sweetener.

• Beverage — reconstituted apple juice, juice blends, nectars, and cider
• Food — a fruit-derived sweetening and juice-content ingredient in confectionery, bakery, and preserves