Tomato Paste

Paste is made from tomatoes grown, harvested, and delivered specifically for processing. These fruit are typically machine-harvested in bulk, moved in trailers rather than cartons, and delivered to the factory within a short window — they are handled as a raw material stream, not as fresh produce. They are selected for concentration behaviour, colour, and solids rather than for the appearance and shipping firmness that fresh-market fruit is picked for.

The temperature at which crushed fruit is first heated determines much of what the finished paste will do in a customer’s formulation. Heating rapidly and hard — the hot break route — inactivates the fruit’s own pectin-degrading enzymes before they can work, preserving pectin and yielding a paste of high viscosity suited to thick sauces and ketchup. Heating gently — the cold break route — lets those enzymes act, giving a thinner paste with a fresher flavour profile, used where low viscosity or lighter character is wanted.

Hot break and cold break paste are therefore not interchangeable, and a contract specifies which is required. This is a genuine processing fork rather than a quality ranking: neither is a defective version of the other.

Paste is bought against a specification rather than by name. Concentration is expressed as soluble solids and is the headline term of any contract — the descriptive labels used in trade, such as double or triple concentrate, correspond to concentration bands defined by the standard or contract in force rather than to any universal value. Colour, consistency or viscosity, and defect counts such as black specks and skin or seed fragments are all specified alongside it.

Much of what a buyer is judging traces straight back to the incoming fruit. Colour, solids, and mould counts are inherited from the raw material and the speed with which it reached the evaporator; a processor can protect them but cannot create them. Paste quality therefore begins in the field and in the delivery window, not at the factory gate.

Most paste moves in bulk aseptic packaging — sterile bags inside drums or bins — which lets it be held and shipped at ambient temperature without refrigeration and is the reason a seasonal crop can supply a year-round manufacturing industry. Smaller volumes are canned or packed in consumer formats. Paste is acidic and heat-treated, which underpins its stability, but it darkens and loses colour quality over time, and that ageing is accelerated by warm storage.

• Food manufacturing — the dominant use, as an ingredient reconstituted into sauces, ketchup, soups, and canned products
• Food service and retail — smaller volumes packed for direct use