Squeezing the juice market
FOOD PROCESSING
SEEKING INDUSTRIAL PARTNER
A Swedish spin-off is developing a new food process - "cold pasteurization" - that could open a new niche in the world fruit-juice market. It is seeking a corporate partner to help scale the process up to industrial volumes.
Ever wonder why off-the-shelf orange juice is so tasteless? A simple reason: it's cooked, repeatedly, on the way to market. It is pasteurized at 80° C for 30 seconds after squeezing, then again when transported in bulk, and a final time at the bottling plant. So real juice fans squeeze their own or go for fresh refrigerated juice - even it it costs a lot more and doesn't last very long.
Saligus AS, a small spin-off company from Gothenberg's Chalmers University of Technology, thinks it has a better way - combining long shelf-life and natural taste. It is developing a new food-processing technique it calls "cold pasteurization." It kills bacteria, so the shelf life is long. But it does less damage to the juice, so the natural flavor isn't spoiled. Taste-tests between fresh and cold-pasteurized juice found people could tell them apart only about half the time - the same as if they had picked at random.
The underlying technology, electron pulses, goes back more than 40 years, with a long record of published research around the world. It's a simple idea: instead of heating the food, zap it with a high-energy electric field, at 20 to 40 kilowatts. The microsecond-scale pulses heat the food only slightly, by 10 to 12 ° C. A variation of the same process, electroporation, is used today to open cells up to receive new DNA in biotechnology.
But the process has long had a downside: It can't process continuous, high volumes of fluid - a prerequisite for any industrial food plant. A Chalmers researcher, Martin Lindgren, solved that problem by inventing a new chamber - called a lobe rotor - through which the juice passes while being zapped. The process is patented; and the company was formed to exploit it in 2003. Christoffer Rappe, a recent graduate from the university's entrepreneurship program, was recruited as its CEO.
The company this May completed an 8.5 milllion Swedish kroner funding round, with Swedish funds Creandum, K-Svets Investors, and others (PDF 33kb). In work with the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology, the company has a model system that can process 200 to 300 litres of fluid an hour; for industrial scale, the flow must rise towards 6,000 litres. As a result, Rappe says, the company is seeking an industrial partner who would "take the risk of being the first to install" a system, and develop it.
Because it's still a new and potentially costly process, cold pasteurization's first application may actually be in high-price multi-vitamin juices, rather than in simple orange juice. But other applications may appear. Research so far suggests the system could be used to open olives up more easily for mashing into olive oil, increasing yield by 5% to 10%, Rappe says.
