Europe’s biggest juice plant starts production

Zumos Valencianos del Mediterraneo SA (Zuvamesa), a consortium of 57 fresh citrus producers, has started production at one of the biggest and most modern not-from-concentrate (NFC) juice plants in Europe.

Located in Puerto de Sagunto, Spain, the 140,000 m² facility is equipped with Tetra Pak state-of-the-art technologies and turnkey processing solutions for juice. The facility provides Zuvamesa with a highly efficient and cost-effective facility for the manufacture of premium quality juice for export, boosting the local juice producers’ competitiveness in the international market.

Tetra Pak equipped Zuvamesa’s new plant with tailor-made processing solutions that include units for pasteurisation, aseptic filling and emptying of 80 stainless steel tanks, cleaning in place, and blending and delivering in bulk. Zuvamesa aims to process up to 400,000 tonnes of local citrus and produce up to 100 million litres of NFC juice annually in the new multimillion-euro facility.

“In selecting the processing solutions for our new plant, we had a few essential requirements: unsurpassed food safety, the finest product quality and the highest levels of efficiency at the lowest operational cost and environmental impact,” said José Maria Andueza, Managing Director, Zuvamesa.

“The Tetra Pak solutions provide maximum production availability and optimisation of operational costs, thanks to a highly automated process control which calculates production data in real time. This is exactly what we need to boost our competitiveness in the market,” he said.

With validated performance guarantees in two fundamental areas, food safety and operating costs, the plant is another example of Tetra Pak’s commitment to provide its customers with cost-driven and resource-effective solutions that address their evermore challenging needs and support their competitiveness.

Responding to the increasing demand for cost-driven and environmentally smart innovations, Tetra Pak’s customised processing solutions balance economic efficiency with ecological performance. In fact, energy consumption and product losses are reduced thanks to the improved systems for energy recovery, energy saving in non production times, automated product return recovery and aseptic energy hibernation.