The first foray into the fruit juice market for CCBE in Egypt, Cappy FruitBite is made without additives and contains 4.3% whole fruit chunks measuring up to 6mm.
It has been launched in four flavours: orange, mango, peach and cocktail (mango plus peach plus guava plus orange), and is filled on a Krones’ FlexiFruit filling line.
Employed by CCBE as part of a twin-flow hot-fill process, Krones’ FlexiFruit technology is an integral part of Krones’ PET monobloc.
The monobloc installation includes a Contiform H16 hot-fill stretch blow-moulding machine, the FlexiFruit filler with pre-dosing starwheel for the fruit-chunks slurry, the main filler carousel, which handles the incoming juice separately from the fruit-chunks, and finally a capper.
Located in a separate bottling hall at CCBE, the filling line can handle 25,000 x 300ml bottles, or 18,000 one-litre bottles an hour.
Critically, the juice and the fruit chunks (suspended in a ‘slurry’) are processed and handled separately throughout until they reach the filling line, where a pre-dosing machine, with 33 valves, fills each 300ml PET container with 30ml of slurry produced from fruit chunks and juice in a ratio of 40:60. The pre-dosing machine is designed to handle large fruit chunks measuring up to 10 x 10ml.
The main filler comprises 55 valves, each of them fitted with a weighing cell, so as to assure an accurate final fill quantity of 300ml with a deviation of just +/-0.5%.
Before the bottles reach the juice filler itself, the weighing cells measure the quantity of slurry dosed into each of them and send this value as feedback to the pre-dosing filler, ensuring that the filling accuracy of each individual pre-dosing valve is continuously optimised. Thus, each and every bottle is checked, making sure that the desired fill quantity of 300ml is constantly achieved, irrespective of the slurry filling function.
The PET containers are fitted with sterilised 38ml wide-neck plastic screwcaps with an O2 scavenger, and the entire hot-fill monobloc features integrated automatic CIP (cleaning in place) and SIP (sterilisation in place) systems.
The newly installed fruit juice line in the CCBE plant north of Cairo joins an existing canning line and a non-returnable-glass line. According to Krones, the crucial element of the line is the rigorous separation of the juice from the fruit chunks throughout, which ensures the quality of the end product.
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